 |
         
|
It was no surprise that the Pew Research report was assigned to female correspondents on all three newscasts. That is because its focus was on the gender of the primary wage-earner in households that include children and teenagers. Many more of those so-called breadwinners are women nowadays (although still a 40% minority), so women got to report the story. The trend represents two separate phenomena: mostly, an increase in single-parent households headed by women; less often, married couples where the wife earns more than the husband.
Which do you think the nightly newscasts find more newsworthy? The financial straits of women-headed, single-parent families (8.6m households nationwide)? Or Mommy-Wars-inflected vignettes of the wife bringing home the bacon (5.1m households)? Both CBS' Anna Werner and NBC's Rehema Ellis misleadingly emphasized the anti-stereotype sex-role-reversal couples. Linsey Davis on ABC skipped the crucial category that Pew Research was analyzing: the report isolated only those households containing children; Davis made it apply to all households of whatever configuration.
As for continuing tornado coverage, it qualified as Story of the Day by virtue of NBC's decision to air double-barreled coverage: first Janet Shamlian narrated twister carnage video from Kansas, Michigan and Pennsylvania, with a tribute to the weatherman at KAMR, her network's local affiliate in Amarillo, Texas; then came a local-news-style three-day forecast from cable television's Chris Warren at the Weather Channel. ABC aired the action via in-house stormchaser Ginger Zee in Texas. CBS opted for the forecast, via David Bernard at WFOR-TV, its local news affiliate in Miami.
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
