Age matters - Media as a tool of social exclusion

Renata Sedlakova, Department of Sociology University of West Bohemia
Lucie Vidovicova, Masaryk University, Faculty of Social Studies

Media are playing a major role in the construction of the meaning of old age. However, not many sociological studies so far provided up-dated insight into the media praxis. Presented study looks at news coverage of three Czech national TV-channels, and a dailies in 2004. Key worlds were used for the sample construction; quantitative and qualitative techniques were used for the analysis. In the quantitative part we concentrated on topics covered and on context of the key words. There are very interesting findings about the language and general journalist praxis too. Surprisingly, the traditional differentiation between tabloids and traditional media in the case of old-age-coverage doesn’t hold. Discussion about some surprising connections between readers of dailies and their old-age-coverage, about the function of media as a social exclusion tool and possibility to actually influence the journalist praxis is part of the paper.