DOES BETTY WHITE’S SHOW STEREOTYPE OLD FOLKS?

Betty White is perpetuating the stereotype of old people and doing them no favors with her Off Their Rockers television show, said Barbara Morris, the 84-year-old author of Put Old on Hold and other books about growing old vigorously, in a statement on Thursday.. Morris, who says that she admires White’s energy and creativity, maintained that White apparently cannot “understand that most of her audience doesn’t grasp that she is trying to spoof the pathetic stereotype of ‘old’ and see it as confirming it instead.” The concept, she asserted is “misguided” and “damaging to all of us who ever get old enough to fall prey to the ‘old people eventually lose it’ stereotype. .. She is undoing the very thing that we love her for — being vibrant and funny and ‘with it’ in her 90s.” White has not yet responded to Morris’s rebuke.