When Margie Donlon was an undergraduate, she made a documentary about her grandmother. “I was filming her in her daily life and noticed howmuch TV she watches. I realized, ‘This is her only window on the rest of the world,’” says Donlon.

Donlon ultimately left filmmaking to study public health at Yale and medicine at the University of Rochester. But a question stayed with her: How does all that TV affect older people, who watch more television than any other age group? Her research, coauthored with Ori Ashman of Murdoch University and Becca R. Levy of Yale University and just published in the Journal of Social Issues (vol. 61, no. 2), suggests a grim answer: The more older people watch television, the worse they view getting old.

“This is sad, but not surprising,” says William Newcott, features editor for AARP The Magazine. “TV is advertising- driven, and so TV programmers are looking for that 18-34 demographic to sell things to. This means that they use a lot of youth-oriented programming, which often sets generations against each other and features all the worst ageist stereotypes. And more often than not, ad campaigns also use older people as a joke. If you watch enough of that TV, these portrayals become your expectation of older people – and yourself.”

Although the AARP and other watchdog groups have launched several campaigns to improve the representations of older people on TV, Donlon surmises, “TV is not going to get better anytime soon.” So she and her co-authors created a tool for older people “to become aware of and to create a shield against some of the stereotypes of aging in the media.”

That tool is a simple diary in which viewers record how frequently and in what ways older people are portrayed on TV. The authors found that research participants between the ages of 60 and 92 who kept this diary every day for a week were more aware of the scarcity of older people on TV than were participants who did not.

“I feel like we’ve been ignored. I feel like we’re nonexistent,” wrote one 68-year-old participant.

Keeping the diary also made participants more aware of the negative portrayal of older people in comedies. An 81-year-old participant wrote in her diary that old people “shouldn’t be the target of jokes so often.”

The diary intervention did not improve participants’ views of aging, perhaps because such deeply ingrained images, developed over a lifetime of TV viewing, are unlikely to change in one week, the authors speculate. However, it did make diary keepers more intent on reducing their TV intake.

Donlon notes that the diary could be easily distributed in senior centers, nursing homes, and day programs for elders. She observes: “There is a lot of outreach to kids about the power of the media. But this group of adults grew up as TV was growing up, without thinking about how to interpret its messages. There are a lot of good things TV can offer older individuals, but they need better media literacy to avoid the many bad things.”

Read more stories by Alana Conner Snibbe.