Contemporary demographic, social, and economic trends stimulate the interest of social and cultural gerontology in exploring the nature and potential influences of media representations of old age. Media representations of old age are of special importance for social scientists because they are related to social relations and reflect the structure of society and its values. So far, there has been no research that would examine how media representations of old age change over time and effect society's attitude towards the older people in Slovenia. In order to gain understanding of the social construction of old age and related trends in the early twenty-first century we implemented longitudinal study, which encompassed the 2004‒2018 election years. First, we analysed coverage of topics related to old age on a sample size of 3,800 articles collected from the three printed daily newspapers Delo, Slovenske novice and Večer using quantitative content analysis. Further we selected a sample of 80 articles of the daily newspaper Delo and analysed the newspaper coverage of 309 problems that people face in old age and 144 related solutions using qualitative content analysis. Our results showed that in the election years from 2004 to 2018, the political and economic aspects of aging were most prominent in daily newspapers, and that social sensitivity to age-related topics increased in the analysed period. Our findings further revealed that three principles related to ageism prevail in representation of older people: normalization, differentiation, and homogenization. Moreover, findings of our study indicate, that most problems and solutions in the newspaper are reported by representatives of the state and interest groups. In contrast to other studies of media representations, our inquiry did not confirm the trend of individualizing responsibility for the problems of older people.
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