“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-16 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Program scripts from week of August 8, 2016
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
RIP Steve Ehmke
I had lost touch with him till a couple years ago when we re-connected on Facebook. By then he was Dave McKay and a star in St. Petersburg Florida. As I thought of him over the weekend, I thought about what I saw in those posts. And it suddenly dawned on me the perfect way to offer my own memorial for him.
If there is one thing you learned back in the day up on top of the hill, it was LOCAL radio. Jim and Pete and Dennis were the standard bearers for deep involvement in the local community. Everyone knew them, and there were days when it seemed like they, especially Jim, knew everyone.
Looking at Steve’s Facebook posts from St. Petersburg, it was clear he still was following that model. He was always posting pictures of coffee at a local diner, or dinner with friends at a local restaurant, where it was pretty clear that he was a regular. Local festivals and many, many locals that he seemed to know pretty well. He was “plugged in” to the community that he served on the air.
I’ve talked a lot about my concerns for this medium that I love so much over the last seven years or so. As I look at the radio industry today, I see an emphasis on corporate ownership and syndicated programming. That’s hardly new, but I’ve always felt that it was radio giving up on it’s most important tool.
Radio was the medium that you could take with you starting in the 1960s. It was all about local Djs, music that reflected local tastes and lots and lots of local information. It was in your house, in your car, at work, even stuck in your back pocket as you walked down the street.
If I could remind the industry of one thing, it’s the importance of being “plugged in” to the market you serve. Really, deeply plugged in.
Steve Ehmke plugged in.
Steve Ehmke was 55 years old.
Presidential Coverage
About seven years or so ago, I’m too lazy to look it up, I hauled out my soap box and ranted for a couple minutes on the boundaries of covering the President of the United States. What triggered it then were reporters who had been following the Obama girls around during their normal routine. I believed then, as I continue to believe today, that the underage children of the President are out of bounds. Completely. Utterly. And without exception. Kids are kids. They didn’t run for public office. They get dragged into it because of decisions made by their parents.
While Mrs. Clinton’s daughter is an adult, and most of Mr. Trump’s children are as well, there is still young Barron Trump. He just turned 10 this spring and would be underage for the entire time his father could potentially be in office.
What really brings this to mind this week has nothing to do with children. It has to do with the photographs of Trump’s wife Melania, taken in 1995 and published recently in the New York Post.
Now, you are free to feel about nude photographs how ever you like. But the question here returns to how the media should be covering the President of the United States and those aspiring to that office.
For the candidates themselves, I’m not sure I see much of anything as being off limits, so long as it is factual and true. If you’re running for that office, you are saying you are someone who should be trusted with one of the most powerful offices in the world, and in the history of humanity. I’m thinking we have the right to as deep a background check as we want in exchange. Yes, that can create a brutal crucible for these candidates to pass through. But I’m in favor of burning away as much of the dross as possible.
But what about the families? If they are involved in the campaign they certainly open themselves up to scrutiny. I don’t think that they have shed all rights to privacy. In the case of the photos of Melania Trump from over two decades ago, my question would be simple – what’s the news value of this? How does this affect the candidate’s qualifications for the office?
The answer to both those questions is – none. It has no news value and has no effect on the Trump qualifications. This was the pre-adolescent sniggering of little boys, done at the supposedly highest levels of the media.
It should be marked as firmly out of bounds.
There is one thing that I have grown increasingly aware of when it comes to the media and the Olympics that wish would simply disappear. And that’s the idiotic paternalism that persists when it comes to the media and women’s sports. The latest was the headline for a story in the Chicago Tribune following a Chicago area athlete winning a medal. The headline and accompanying tweet did not refer to “three time Olympian” Corey Cogdell-Unrein. It did not refer to “two time Olympic medalist” Corey Cogdell-Unrein. The headline read “Wife of Chicago Bears lineman wins Bronze at Olympics today”. Do you note what wasn’t included? Yeah, the name of the actual athlete who did something worthy of note. I am certain that her husband, defensive lineman and occasional fullback Mitch Unrein, fully supports his wife’s athletics. But she had been an Olympian twice before they were married. The paper later corrected the headline and apologized.
This isn’t the only time in this Olympics this has happened. NBC, the network carrying the Olympics, credited the husband of Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszu with her success. I’m pretty sure he didn’t swim a single stroke in Brazil.
Sadly, it’s not just the Olympics where we see this kind of idiocy. Last year at the Australian Open tennis tournament, Canadian player Eugenie Bouchard, came off the court following a big win and was asked to “give us twirl” and talk about her outfit. Bouchard was the number seven ranked woman in the world at that moment.
I understand that generally women’s sports don’t get a lot of air time. Outside of professional tennis and golf, the women’s national soccer team, and college basketball, women’s sports don’t get much attention by the sports media. I’m just wondering why it seems to be so hard to treat the athletes like, well, athletes. Forty five percent of the athletes in Brazil right now are women. Surely we are past the stage where the world thinks “Wow, those are girls out there on the field” or whatever.
I understand that the media decides what gets shown based on audience interest, and men’s sports are more popular. Maybe if we treated all the athletes the same when it came time to interview them or talk about them, audience interest might rise as well.
Either that or athletes should be given the right to challenge the talking heads to an athletic contest. When the media loses, it’ll be their turn to “give us a twirl”.
Then, maybe, we could get back to the concepts of athletes and competition.
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2016
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
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