Today, Jim Romenesko posted an update to his article about a female cardboard cutout, which appears to resemble the stereotypical, white, on-the-go soccer mom, that is apparently being posted around various TV news stations as an example target audience for writers and on-screen personalities. In the original post, Romenesko was curious to know whether WSPA in Spartanburg, S.C., rolled out its cutout “mom” named Michelle on the advice of a TV consultant.
A female TV journalist responded to the question with the following rather damning critique of the type of advice a male consultant has been giving to Raycom Media-owned TV stations, which carry similar firefighters-to-the-rescue-type local coverage as WSPA. Consequently, Raycom owns WTNZ here in Knoxville; WSPA is owned a company called Media General.
The journalist had this to say about the consultant’s sage advice:
To answer your question regarding whether media consultants nationwide are giving similar advice, WSPA’s “Michelle” is a copy of the “Female Switchable” that [a consultant] has been preaching to Raycom Media-owned stations around the country for more than two years.
[He] describes her as a mother short on logic but long on social media obsession, terrified of her neighbors, needing constant updates on the weather and consumer trends, with the attention span of a fourth-grader and much less understanding of the greater world around her. She wants “lists,” wants to know how things “affect her.” She’s self-centered, myopic and terrified.
She is nothing like the women I know, and I’m glad you finally called television news out on this caricature. I’d really like to see the data that’s used to build that caricature, because as far as I can see, she’s the sexist mythology of overpaid consultants.
This consultant’s fallacy of the “female switchable” isn’t good for anyone. And it isn’t good for the company.
According to Romenesko, the consultant declined to comment other than to dispute these claims. Needless to say, if this critique is even half true, Raycom is putting forth a rather dim view of its own target audience, casting its female viewers as fearful, short-sighted and selfish. And that’s just what this consultant, or people like him, allegedly think about the target audience for local news, which apparently is the white, female, working mom demographic. I wonder what glowing traits these same consultants would bestow on black and Hispanic families, single moms and blended parental units?
In any case, I previously questioned whether white working moms should even be the target audience for a station located in Spartanburg, S.C., which isn’t exactly a mecca of affluent white suburbia. More than half of the population of the city of Spartanburg is black, after all; only parts of the county outside city limits are a majority white.
Reality has never really stopped local TV news stations from catering to stereotypes and offering shallow and trite coverage of their communities in the past; why should Michelle be any different?