“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 December 18, 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.
The Zsa Zsa Effect
We want to believe that in America you become successful because you earn it. One of the underlying foundation pieces of our national mythology is that this is a meritocracy. You earn success and fame.
What brings all this to mind was the death of celebrity Zsa Zsa Gabor this. Ms. Gabor was famous (the ultimate American accolade of success) for being famous. In fact, it can be argued that she was a tipping point in our culture when it comes to the question of fame.
Technically, Zsa Zsa (her birth name was Sari) was an actress. She appeared in sixty some movies, though none of them are likely to spring to mind. You can also add Miss Hungary 1936. But mostly she was famous simply for being famous. With a big personality, blond good looks, a love of diamonds and a penchant for changing husbands (by her count she had eight and a half), Zsa Zsa was a celebrity. And that was pretty much all she was.
Suddenly, you didn’t have to be successful, you didn’t have to be good at something. You could simply be famous. It helps to be good looking and at least be connected to wealth, although you don’t actually to be wealthy yourself. In his 1961 book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America” historian Daniel Boorstin talked about how mass media had split the concept of fame away from the idea of greatness. Journalist and academic Neil Gabler later dubbed the resulting demographic as “human entertainment”. Gabler actually calls the whole process the “Zsa Zsa Effect”. Like Ms. Gabor, modern celebrity is brash and glittering but ultimately shallow. To borrow Gertrude Stein’s line, “there’s no there there”.
Fame has become a goal in and of itself. The problem is that it no longer requires any form of excellence to qualify. If it was the advent of television that began the process, the easy access afforded to the mass audience by the Internet has accelerated the growth of the “famous for being famous” demographic a thousand fold.
The woman who may have begun it all lived a long life of fame. In 2002 she was partially paralyzed in a car accident, later had two strokes and spent the final years of her life on various forms of life support. Not the kind of glamour we associate with the name. But fame strips away reality, leaving only the diamonds and glitter behind.
Zsa Zsa Gabor was 99 years old.
A Little Less Live
All of a sudden it seems like everything has to be “live”. There’s been the run of live musical theater specials on television, the latest one being “Hairspray” from a week or so ago. There’s the “Live PD” show on one of the cable networks I talked about last month. There’s “Facebook Live” where you can stream whatever is going on in your life live onto your Facebook feed for all your friends to watch. I just saw an announcement that Twitter has brought live video to the Twitter app so that you can “Go Live”.
As someone with a background with both live theater and real-time media, I find a lot of this a little strange.
Certainly, there is a lot to be said for “going live”. The sense of immediacy, especially with breaking news can be very important. What a lot of people don’t realize is how much of the “live” media is very carefully prepared before it goes on the air.
A musical is rehearsed for weeks or months before the audience member settles into a seat. Live broadcasts, even news broadcasts, are carefully scripted. The idea is that it should all appear to flow smoothly and naturally. There is an enormous difference between “live” and “spontaneous”. The other thing that people may be overlooking is that “live” means no “do overs”. Once you hit the button, whatever happens, happens.
Every broadcaster has at least one such story. At the very beginning of my career, I was a newscaster. I was working at a new station and saw they had what’s called a “cough button” installed. It cut out the feed to the microphone so you could cough or sneeze or, well, belch. So bright one morning, I’m doing the morning news. I feel a burp coming on, reach down and hit the button. I proceed to let loose with the kind of noise that rattles windows and would make any ten-year-old boy proud. I released the button and proceeded to finish the broadcast. At which point I noted the morning DJ (who also happened to be my boss) was looking at me like I’d grown a second head. Turns out that was the “old” cough button. Which no longer was connected. Live radio.
So here’s what I want you to think about before you jump on the live bandwagon. Are you absolutely sure that you want the entire world to be able to see what is about to happen? No matter what happens. Your life is both live and spontaneous. That means there’s a certain risk in hitting that button.
In the early days of television, everything was “live”. One of the reasons they stopped doing that was to gain more control of what the world saw. It’s a lesson worth considering again today.
Politics Free RFE
You probably have to be at least my age to remember the television public service announcement for Radio Free Europe. Where the Czech DJ rattled off an introduction to the classic tune “On Broadway” in his native tongue. Until it hit the news last week, my bet is most of us had forgotten about things like “Voice of America” and “Radio Free Europe”. In case you’ve never heard of either of them, they are news and information channels, first radio, later adding television and the internet, created to deliver honest news to parts of the world where it may not be readily available. Launched during the Cold War to broadcast into Soviet bloc nations and the USSR itself, the services have been joined over the years by others like Radio y Television Marti aimed at Cuba, Radio Free Asia for southeast Asia, and Alhurra which serves nations in the Middle East. All of them, along with “Voice of America” and a couple others, are overseen by an independent group called the “Board of Broadcasters”. This Board was designed to be a firewall between the news and official political interference.
Or at least it was. Under the “National Defense Authorization Act of 2017”, that Board is effectively being disbanded. All these American news sources will be overseen by a single chief executive appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. This concerns me and I believe it should concern you too.
The reason given for the change was a study that showed that the Board of Broadcasters wasn’t doing a very good job. The members only served part-time, and it appears many of them didn’t take the job very seriously. Rather than fix the problem, Congress decided to simply blow everything up and start over.
You’re going to hear a lot of discussion centering on the fact that there’s a new President about to be sworn in. I want to be clear that I don’t want ANY President, from ANY party to have this kind of direct control of these outlets. Combined these services have an audience of over 200 million people who rely on the historic credibility of the news. Credibility built on the editorial independence of the services.
The changes, which sadly have bipartisan support, have the potential to, as the old saying goes, “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. There’s a reason why authoritarian governments all over the world try to jam these broadcasts. The basic formula has worked for more than sixty years. Destroying the system that created that success will only result in destroying the credibility on which it was built.
Radio Free Europe and it’s siblings need to be a politics free as possible.
Here’s the public service announcement mentioned in the show:
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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