“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 November 21, 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.
Christmas Commercials
If you have listened to this program for any length of time you will be unsurprised to discover that one of the defining moments for the beginning of the Christmas season at my house are television commercials. For The Kid it is the Hershey’s kisses commercials. Once she sees those, the season can begin. Being a little more old school, I look forward to the Corona beer Christmas lights on the palm tree spot. That’s a bucket list item for me, Christmas in the tropics. In the old days, it was the Norelco “Santa riding a shaver through the snow”. Don’t see it, not even the updated version, as often as I used to.
Commercials are a thing for me. I am fascinated by this most American of art forms. Whether they are small budget or large, it’s fun to step back and try and figure out both how and if, they work.
There are two commercials running this Christmas season that I find very interesting. Two companies are using their considerable advertising budgets to remind us of the importance of seeing past our differences.
Apple is going big, as they often do, with a Christmas spot about Frankenstein’s monster attempting reach out to the local village. If you haven’t seen it yet I won’t spoil the ending, except to say that it doesn’t go well at first. With a nice nod to the original movie version, it is a little girl who helps the monster reach past the initial fear of the villagers. The bit with the Christmas lights is particularly inspired. There is no mention of the sponsor till the very end, and that’s only in the form of the Apple logo.
Amazon is a little more business oriented in the story of a Catholic priest and Muslim Iman who arrive at the same the exact same gift idea for their friend. As someone whose knees are starting to creak when I get up and down for any reason, I appreciated the idea they had for each other. This commercial is doubly wonderful since it features a real-life pair of clerics.
I’m impressed by a couple things about these ads. First, is their timeliness. Sure, we get lots of messages about peace and goodwill and all that jazz this time of year. But these come at a time when we can become overly concerned about the “stuff” that seems to have taken over the season, it’s nice to see a couple of international corporations dropping some big bucks on ideas rather than sales. I have no doubt that creating a little warm spot in consumers hearts won’t hurt their bottom lines either.
Amazon lets the story tell itself, but Apple gives us a good thought to start the new season. Open your heart to everyone.
Yeah, it feels like Christmas.
Copyright and Birth Video
I’m going to take a minute to set up this next program. There are a couple things we all need to have straight in our heads.
First, according to the United States Copyright office, a work is protected by copyright from the moment it is created and made tangible. So a video you make has copyright protection from the moment you record it.
Second, a concept we’ve talked about is “fair use”. This is a small exception to absolute copyright protection. Small portions of a copyright protected work can, under certain circumstances, be quoted verbatim for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research, without the need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder.
Finally, we have a new option on Facebook, called Facebook Live. In simplest terms, you can now live stream events in your life to your Facebook page. The videos are then stored after the live stream stop, so people can play them like a normal video clip on your page.
Got it? So here’s where all three of these come together. Kali Kanongata’a is from the Pacific island of Tonga. He decided he wanted to share the birth of his son, taking place in California, with his family. So he live streamed the entire thing on Facebook. He thought that only his family could see it, only to discover that a much wider world was watching. At the time, he was fine with that. Then ABC’s “Good Morning America” used twenty-two seconds of the forty-five minute feed as part of a story about the growing use of live feeds by everyday people. The story was also carried by ABC’s media partner, Yahoo.
Kanongata’a is suing the two media giants for copyright violation. The networks are arguing that this is a simple case of “fair use”.
As much as I am usually all for the rights of the content creator, I can’t imagine this case is going to last long. I’m not a copyright attorney but this appears to be a pretty cut case for the fair use concept.
Far more importantly is the reminder that everything that you put up on the Internet is available to pretty much the entire world. There are ways to limit access, of course, but the father in this case chose to use technology without completely understanding it. When he did realize how many people could see it, he CHOSE to continue on.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. That applies as much to the online world as anywhere else. And once it’s done, you may end up in places you never expect.
Think of that poor kid. His entry into the world will be around for everyone to see for all of his life. Talk about having your rights violated.
Media Literacy
A new study done by some folks at Stanford University should cause us all to take a moment’s pause. The study worked with over seven thousand young people between middle school and college. What the study discovered is that too many of our youth can not tell the difference between a legitimate news story and a fake story.
Let’s be clear right up front. I’m not talking about stories that show differing points of view about an issue. This study was looking at stories that presented something as fact without any backing facts at all. In one example, middle school students were shown a photograph of some withered daisies under a headline talking about toxic conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan. Without any indication where that photo was taken, forty percent of the students believed that it offered proof of the headline. In another example, eighty-two percent of the students couldn’t differentiate between a news story and a sponsored content ad.
While the study focused only on young people, I wonder how well all of us do when it comes to judging what we see online. More often than I’m proud to admit, I share something that turns out to be out of date, or based on wrong information. The startling thing is that if I’d just taken a minute or two, literally a minute or two, I would have caught the wrong information.
We keep telling ourselves how sophisticated we all are about the flood of information, both good and bad, that currently floods into our lives. I’m not so sure that reality is quite as smooth as we believe.
Far more important than just shaking our heads in dismay is the question of what should we do? The first thing is to grow a healthy sense of skepticism, and help our kids to do likewise. We should all be asking questions about what we read and see. The question of whether this seems too good (or bad) to be true is a good place to start. Asking what the person “reporting” the story may have to gain isn’t an unreasonable question either. Lateral research is when you look up who the author or organization is, find out what they’re doing and why. Then go back and look at the story again with that information.
There is a certain amount of hand-wringing about teaching our kids “real world skills”, like balancing a checkbook or changing a tire on the car. We need to include concepts like research skills, and fact checking in the list of skills that the modern person needs to survive.
We can probably all use a little brush up on those skills as we move forward.
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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