“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.
Programs from week of September 26, 2016
This Week’s Podcast:
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.
A Question of Scale
When my family moved from western New York to Richmond, Virginia we had a lot of things that we had to adjust to. First, people talk funny down here. Second, the following foods are “things” down here, ham biscuits, pimento cheese, and green beans. I know, there are green beans in the north, but they are a thing down here. We got some as a housewarming present.
What really surprised us was simply the scale of everything. We moved from Bemus Point, with a population of about three hundred sixty people, to the greater Richmond Virginia area. Population? Just over a million. There is more of everything here. That change in scale was very disorienting when we first arrived.
What brings the question of scale to mind is a new study about streaming video. Ooyala, a company that provides online video technology and services, notes that this year saw a milestone in online video viewing. For the first time, more than half of all online video viewing was done on a mobile device. That was a fifteen percent increase over 2015 and a two hundred three percent increase over 2014.
That doesn’t surprise me in a lot of ways. If there is one thing we have seen consistently in the switch from old school media to new, it is the increasing desire for more personalized media. Today’s social media is set up to try and make our experience as unique to us as possible. Like them or not, that is the goal of Facebook’s algorithms. To create a feed that only shows us stuff we’re interested in.
It all makes me wonder about how the old line media is going to react to this. Their track record so far has been pretty dismal. The conventional way to approach something is through MASS media, through BROADcasting. I’m not sure that’s where they need to be.
Here’s an example – football season just started. A variety of service providers are making a big deal about packages that provide you with “EVERY GAME, ALL SEASON LONG”. Given that I don’t care about any team other than the Steelers and the Bills, why does this package interest me? I don’t care if Dallas is “America’s Team”, which it isn’t, I want the media that I want. Don’t give me the Chiefs and the Titans and Lions and Rams PLUS the Steelers and the Bills. The trend clearly seems to be in the direction of “tailor it to me”.
After all is said and done, the challenge facing the media today is the same one facing me when I moved to the big city. Can it adjust to the change in scale that will mark the media of the future?
The other thing history shows us is that if they don’t, someone else will.
R.I.P. Arnie
Sometimes we need to remember that the world was not created just last week. There is a little something called “recency bias”, which is the human tendency to put more emphasis on what we remember happening recently rather than what happened longer ago. In the media, it’s a tendency to believe that we’ve never seen anything like what we’re seeing right now. That no one has had the kind of impact on popular culture and media that current stars do.
That’s usually wrong. Time for a little history lesson. Let’s take our example from the world of sports.
This Past Sunday saw the passing of golf legend Arnold Palmer. That normally would not call for any notice here. Arnie and I are both from southwestern Pennsylvania (I even lived briefly in his hometown of Latrobe) and we both play golf. So I have a soft spot for him. But this is a program about the media, so what’s the connection?
If I asked you to name the player who changed the game of golf by inspiring thousands upon thousands of fans on television, my bet is that most people would answer Tiger Woods. Here’s the reality, long before Tiger took his first swing on “The Mike Douglas Show”, Arnie Palmer transformed the game of golf. Golf before Palmer was a game for the elite, played at exclusive locations. The working classes, that’s you and me, would occasionally permitted in to watch our betters show us how it was done.
As television began to move heavily into sports, a new kind of golfer took command of the stage. He was the son of the head pro and groundskeeper at a small country club. On TV he came across like an everyday guy, the kind of guy you might have a beer with. And he won. He drew in fans who came just to see him play. They were “Arnie’s Army”. Suddenly golf was a game that we all could play. Arnie became one of the first sports stars to turn that fame into long-lasting business success. Palmer was very successful as a course designer but he also was one of the guiding forces in creating the Golf Channel. In many ways, the perfect closing of the circle of the man who made golf a TV staple. Heck, he even had his own drink.
Without Arnie, golf might remain a rich man’s sport. His long-time friend and rival Jack Nicklaus brought a different kind of stardom to the game. Without Arnie, golf might not have been a game that a young Tiger Woods could have played.
Media stars aren’t something new. It wouldn’t hurt a few of the current generation to remember that they didn’t invent their art, their sport, or their media. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
Arnie Palmer was 87 years old.
Endorsements
I try very hard to keep focused on the topic of these programs, the media. Entertainment, information, communication. Politics is something I try to avoid. First, because it is not the topic. Second, because I can’t imagine that anyone is or should be interested in my opinion. In my career, I ventured into that quagmire a couple times. And embarrassed myself every one of them.
But this time of year, it can be really, REALLY hard. Presidential politics are around every media corner. Which got me thinking about one of the oldest intersections of media and politics. The political endorsement.
I have certain reservations about endorsements in all hues. As much as I love Bruce Springsteen, why should I care who he thinks should be the next President, or Governor, or School Board member for that matter? The endorsement of movie stars, or musicians or radio personalities should carry all the weight of any other kind of junk food. But, Americans tend to be very star-struck, however.
The other endorsement that pops up at election time are the ones from the news media. Radio stations, television stations and most venerable of all, newspaper endorsements. I’m not talking about the ones from talking heads, but the old fashioned editorial endorsement. That began with newspapers sometime around the time of Lincoln’s first election.
Traditionally, a newspaper has two branches – the news department and the editorial. They are supposed to operate independently of one another. Endorsements come from the editorial board. While traditional, more papers (and other media outlets) are moving away from endorsing political candidates. The first reason is that they have come to see endorsements as contrary to their goal of unbiased journalism. If you’re taking sides you’re not really unbiased. This is a trend that has been gaining strength for a while. The conversation at the Los Angeles Times has an interesting history. They stopped doing Presidential endorsements in 1972, then reversed that decision in 2008. They noted that they were discussing the presidency all year long and it made little sense to suddenly stop at election time.
It all may be a moot point. Several studies seem to indicate that newspaper endorsements have little to no impact on the outcome of elections, national or local. Endorsements from large organizations like unions may have some impact with the voters who are members of that organization.
The most important endorsement is the one that a candidate receives from an informed voter. Relying on someone else to do your thinking for you is a cop out. Get Informed. Get Registered. Get Out and Vote.
That’s probably as political as you will ever hear this program get.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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
Stories Are My Life 
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