There is a very similar piece of nonsense in the current Cotswold Life magazine, which I happened to glance at while I was staying down there recently. The author was complaining that a friend, a music journalist, had given him a Richard Thompson CD. He believed that his friend must have assumed he had gone yokel (not his words) since moving to the Cotswolds and would therefore be interested in folk music (never mind that RT is an internationally acclaimed songwriter and guitarist). In the course of the article he writes about folk song and folk singers in a way which suggests he has not listened to or seen either.

It's perhaps to be expected that a journalist in a hurry will resort to stereotypes, if only to get their message across with the minimum of words. It's less forgiveable in a lengthy and presumably thought-out magazine article. What I find annoying is that the stereotypes are at least 40 years out of date - now that is lazy journalism. No journalist writing about contemporary popular music would refer to "beat combos" or "mop-heads". If they're going to use stereotypes, let them at least be accurate and up-to-date ones.