Abstract
News representation of older people has been observed to stigmatize or stereotype them in ways that raise concerns about the reinforcement of social ageism, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent Western literature (2020-2021) has revealed that, in the context of COVID-19, older people are primarily depicted as a vulnerable, homogeneous, or misbehaving group. Such discourses not only weaken their social status but also naturalize pandemic prevention measures against them. Therefore, it is important to examine news media communication about the pandemic and older people to combat problematic or unfair portrayals. This study collected relevant news articles from a mainstream news archive in Taiwan, targeting the sampling period between April 2020 and February 2023. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), the study examined discursive representational strategies with a focus on referential strategies, older people as active agents, and passive recipients of actions in the news. The final goal of this research is to decode the ideological implications underlying these representational strategies. Since the epidemic progression in Taiwan differed from that in other countries, the sampling period was divided into three stages to analyze how older people were portrayed in distinct phases. This sampling scheme made this project the first longitudinal study and the first Taiwan-based linguistic study on this research topic among all relevant literature.
Author Information
Chin-Hui Chen, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Yu-Jing Chen, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Paper Information
Conference: KAMC2024
Stream: Language and Cultural Studies
This paper is part of the KAMC2024 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Chen C., & Chen Y. (2024) Discursive Representation of Older People in Taiwanese Newspapers on the COVID-19 Pandemic ISSN: 2436-0503 – The Kyoto Conference on Arts, Media & Culture 2024: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 343-352) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2436-0503.2024.31
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2436-0503.2024.31
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