Idol's White-Guy Problem: Scotty McCreery Wins American Idol: Why He Won - The Daily Beast

Scotty McCreery Wins American Idol: Why He Won - The Daily Beast: "First the good news. American Idol had two massive overriding goals in this tenth season: to keep the ratings from going into freefall post-Simon Cowell, and to produce a winner who could sell tons of records, something Idol has not done now for years.
The first of these Idol accomplished, and then some. The ratings this season have been at worst only slightly down from last year, and on some weeks, they have been up substantially; a feat almost without precedent for a TV show in its tenth year (that’s 80 years in Earth time), let alone one which has just lost its iconic star."
On the second goal—creating a mega-selling recording act—it is too soon to say, but there is certainly cause for cautious optimism about Idol’s just crowned champion Scotty McCreery. There is a case to be made that as an attractive young man with a solid voice working in the Idol-friendly country genre, Scotty might end up becoming Idol’s biggest record mover in a half decade, since the show last crowned a country champion, with Carrie Underwood. Only time will tell and many a slip occurs on the way to the Billboard charts, but having dominated the season as no Idol has since Underwood, the signs are positive.
Given these successes any objections fall into the category of “yes... but”s and can easily be classed minor quibbles. But minor though they may be, the stack of quibbles this season has accumulated can be piled fairly high. Taken together, they paint a picture of very different Idol emerging this season from the goliath America has come to regard with awe and terror. It is a show still with some great strengths and whose following is not going anywhere anytime soon. But after Season 10, the era when Idol was seen as a supernatural force seems to be at an end. The time of thinking of Idol as just a TV show among TV shows may have arrived.
For starters, we might very well mark Season 10 as the year Idol’s glass ceiling was cemented in place. It’s hard to say exactly how many clinical trials one would need to prove the theorem that good looking white males are the only category with any chance of win, but four lab tests seems ample. For the show’s first six years, its winners were as diverse a pool of gender and genres as one could have imagined; veering from Kelly Clarkson to Ruben Studdard, Fantasia to Carrie, Taylor and Jordin Sparks. And then, four white male champions, without interruption. At this point it seems safe to say, barring a force of nature appearing on the Idol stage, no one outside of this demographic need apply for the crown.