The Research On The Old Image In Hunan Province Metropolitan Newspapers

With the rapid growth of the elderly, aging population has become a serious socialproblem in China.This growth brings not only challenges but also opportunities to thedevelopment of the mass media.On the one hand, the mass media has a huge number ofloyal audiences on elderly people;on the other hand, the mass media must take theirresponsibility to create a good social atmosphere for the elderly people. For the former,many media have caught the elderly as the emerging market and opened a new field forthe traditional media by creating newspapers aimed at the old groups. For the later, themass media have concerned much on the elderly pension issues. But how to spread theelderly image should be paid more attention, because this issue has a huge impact forthe construction of a harmonious aging society. Media affects not only the publicperception for the elderly group, but also the way the whole society treat them, eventhe policies for this group formulated by the government or the relevant departments.This paper collected some reports related to the elderly for a full year from"Xiaoxiang Morning paper","Changsha Evening News" and "SanXiang MetropolisDaily" as research samples. It analyzed the newspapers of Hunan on how to reproducethe elderly image quantitatively and qualitatively based on the perception of the basicreporting approach, the basic characteristics of the elderly and the news textanalysis.The study found that the metropolitan newspapers describe the elderly withthe image of "vulnerable groups". They pay more attention to the private life of theelderly, little on the social field and this conforms to the stereotypes feature of theelderly. In order to test whether the image of the elderly passed by the media isconsistent with the social image and how this has greatly affect the public, we handedout questionnaires respectively to the elderly and non elderly groups. The results ofthis survey show that most of the public agree with the media on the image of thisgroup, but the elderly audiences do not agree with the social public and the media.Thesurvey also found that both the public’s and the elderly group’s perceptions on thisissue are affected by the media on different levels. As for the existing problem ofmetropolis daily reports on the elderly, this paper will give some suggestions, such asincreasing the number of reports on the elderly, giving the elderly more mediadiscourse and so on.