Mattel unveiled their 125th Barbie yesterday. Coincidentally (or not) News Anchor Barbie (we’ll call her Journalism Barbie) has come into existence at exactly the same time that real, respectable news reporting is fading into nonexistence. Images of the doll show the impossibly-proportioned classic girly girl in a pink fuzzy blazer, a frill skirt and high heels, with a microphone in hand. One has to wonder—is she doing her reporting for the “E!” channel?
Journalism Barbie’s aforementioned outfit, while it may look nice for the reporting part of her job, would be very uncomfortable for actual journalism. I can’t imagine that she’d be very comfortable visiting Afghanistan in those high-heel Mary Janes, and all of her investigative interviews would have to take place over the phone for her to have any hope of being taken seriously.
That said, career Barbies are obviously dolls and didn’t exactly become famous for their realism in the first place. It would almost be weird if Journalism Barbie wasn’t wearing pink.
What’s actually disturbing about the doll is what they got right: Besides her outfit, Barbie looks exactly like a modern reporter, i.e., a beauty pageant contestant on Valium.
Lately the hotness of the people reporting our news seems to be an inverse function of the quality of the content. I’m not saying that the hot reporters are dumb. I’m merely observing that journalism has become dumb, and that bosses are hiring pretty faces to report instead of people who make us feel safe—the Walter Cronkites and Connie Chungs (no offence to Connie).
At the New York Toy Fair last February, a spokesperson from Mattel announced that the 125th anniversary edition of Barbie would either be an architect, a computer engineer, an environmentalist, a surgeon or a journalist, and that it would be up to a world-wide vote of Barbie fans to decide which she’d be.
It seems as though the girls who used to be obsessed with Barbies grew up into journalists and voted this new doll into existence. Whenever I meet an astoundingly dumb, over-dressed female, it almost invariably comes up that she majored in journalism. It seems the journalism major is the new psych major. And now we’re all on Lexapro.
Journalism Barbie is a hallmark for the fall of journalism. She should be Blogger Barbie. It seems like that’s where we’re headed, both in online and on-air reporting. The only problem is that she’d have to wear something different, because in all likeliness, her job will be an unpaid internship.
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