Senior citizens are invisible in the press during disaster: Report

Kathmandu / October 2 : The voice of senior citizens remains unheard and they are found invisible in the media outlets during disaster, a recently concluded research reveals.

“The contents analysis after the earthquake in 2015 for the period of three months shows that hardly thirty-six news-stories in relation to senior citizens were recorded from the Kathmandu-based three leading newspapers,” presenting a paper titled, “Media Response to Older People during Disaster,” researcher Chun Bahadur Gurung stated, “While a privately run daily Nepali language newspaper covered 59 percent of the total stories and an English daily 14 percent and interestingly the government run newspaper treated only 27 percent of the stories”. On the occasion of International Day of Older People, the event was organized by Rights and Dignity Centre (RDC), Kathmandu.

Another analysis also corroborates it as press contents from eleven outlets analyzed after the earthquake finds no reference to the senior citizens. The research finding have also been substantiated with a study on elderly abuse by the National Human Rights Commission of Nepal as the issues of abuses were rarely reported by the press unless it took some form of a criminal case. Interestingly, the stories reported have been found to be treated as filler stories.

The role of mass media during is undeniably critical. “But most of the senior citizens during disaster rely on family, friends and neighbors for the life-saving information during rescue phase,” stated Mr. Gurung, “Majority of the sampled respondents – 62.20 percent of them relies on family, friends and neighbors for life saving information and 22.83% of them on local FM radio.” It also challenges the international media portrayal over the disaster-affected communities, including senior citizens as they tend to portray disaster-affected communities as helpless and saved only by outside aid.

The demographic indicators indicate globally that the planet is likely to become a “world of older people” and Nepal is no exception. In view of the rapidly growing population of the senior citizens, it is important to pay more attention to it from media and communication perspectives as the study further explores opportunities to examine the damages caused by the poorly-perceived and/or wrongly-disseminated life-saving messages during disaster as three cases found from the sample districts seriously raise questions over the messages design and dissemination.