The Media's Representation of Baby Boomers Is Not Fair

I’m 65 years old but, like my friends who are the same age, do not feel or act “old.” All of us are still working, and thus paying into Social Security rather than drawing on it, and we pay our own health insurance (rather than have Medicare pick up the tab.) We all have the normal aches and pains that come with bodies of that vintage, but none of us have chronic or debilitating illnesses. In short, we’re very much the same people we were ten, twenty, and even thirty years ago, when we were considered to be in the prime of life.

This reality is much different than the ways in which the media portrays baby boomers, both financially and physically. I recently completed a literature search of newspaper and magazine articles about boomers, and the results were discouraging. The media’s narrative of boomers is entirely about aging, I learned, an odd thing given that, as Ashton Applewhite has pointed out, all of us are aging all the time. Why is it just boomers who are just getting older (and old) one may reasonably ask?

Worse, nothing about the aging of baby boomers or the generation as a whole is presented in positive terms. None of the hundreds of articles I read had anything good to say about the generation, a strange and disturbing thing given that my friends and I are finding our respective third acts of life to be a positive experience and that there is no evidence to suggest that we are harming society in any real way. (This despite the hateful claims of boomer-bashers.) In fact, boomers have begun to give much of their money away, leading me to think that this long-anticipated wealth transfer would have restored our much-maligned image.

The financial picture that the media paints of baby boomers directly contradicts the economic status of myself and my friends. (Note: We are all upper-middle-class white males, and race, gender, and class all relate to economic status.) According to journalists, my generation represents a major threat to the national economy as we are, in their words, monetarily "unprepared," "dependent," or downright "broke.” The news is not any better regarding our physical selves. Boomers have or are prone to having a litany of illnesses, the articles state, including hepatitis, diabetes, hearing loss, obesity, drug addiction, depression, anxiety, arthritis, memory loss, Alzheimer's and dementia, and cancer.

Are some baby boomers broke? No doubt. Do some suffer from serious physical or mental illness? Absolutely. But I don’t see the media branding any other generation in such a sweeping way, and we can safely assume that Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z have their share of financial challenges and/or health issues. By misrepresenting the lives of boomers, journalists are fueling misperceptions about the generation and spreading hatred towards them.

Although unfortunate, the current, wholly negative narrative of baby boomers should not come as too much of a surprise, as it is consistent with the ways in which the media has always presented the generation. As children, boomers were deemed overly independent and free-spirited; as young adults, we were said to lack a work ethic; as middle-aged adults, we were believed to work too hard and consume too much. Now, as older adults, boomers are being blamed for causing the housing crisis by choosing to age in place and not retire to a warm and sunny place. The generation is routinely told to, again in the words of journalists, "step aside," "pass the torch," and "get out of the way" lest we be "kicked out."

For whatever reason, baby boomers have never been liked by younger or older generations, and our determination to not disappear is making critics all the more unhappy. In his 2006 book The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy, Leonard Steinhorn, a professor of communications at American University, argued that boomers were permanently cast as villains because they forever “changed an America their elders didn't want to see changed,” as good an explanation as any for the negative perceptions that continue to this day. “Boomers have been a piñata for cultural critics,” Steinhorn added, the good news being that the generation has gotten used to the whacking.