Between Negative Ageism and Compassionate Ageism: Post-COVID-19 Media Representation of Older People in Hong Kong

Older people were among the groups most at risk in pandemics such as COVID-19. Previous studies found that, during COVID-19, the media not only subjected older people to negative ageism that stereotypically victimized them, but also compassionate ageism that prompted unsolicited concern out of pity or goodwill. Both types of ageism could undermine the mental health of older people and prompt inadequate health behaviors for disease prevention due to a distorted risk perception imposed on the age group. This study analyzes narratives about older people in the media in Hong Kong in 2024, when the city fully retreated from pandemic mode. Deconstructing these narratives helps unpack the (re)imagination of old age post-COVID. The case of Hong Kong not only demonstrates the dynamics between negative and compassionate ageism in a highly secular Chinese society, but also the health inequality embedded in the information environment.

This study utilizes a large dataset of media coverage on health in Hong Kong, consisting of about 500,000 online and offline articles. A human-in-the-loop computational mixed methods analytical approach is adopted. Media texts about older people are filtered and analyzed by natural language processing techniques. Machine learning is applied to content-analyze media articles. First, Topic Modeling identifies the health issue being discussed. Next, ageist narratives are identified by supervised machine learning, where researchers trained text models through qualitative content analysis, which teaches the computer to classify ageist narratives in the sea of data. Finally, results are combined to map the prevalence of both types of ageism in the media sphere on COVID-19 and across different health topics. The findings are compared to the study conducted in 2020 to demonstrate the evolution of media representation of older people. This study also generates nuanced contextual evidence that addresses ageism in the post-pandemic world and its relations with health inequality.