“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 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.
Year in Review, Part 1
Over the last couple years, I have made it a habit to take the final week of the year and look back at the topics we’ve discussed. Most years I am a little surprised at what I find.
A year’s worth of the View From the Phlipside is one hundred fifty-six programs. Some years may be a few less than that due to illness or technical issues. This year was bang on the nose.
A percentage of those shows are remembrances of people who held a special place in the media but don’t always get the star treatment when they die. This year was unique in that I had to report on the deaths of two people I counted as friends, Jim Roselle and Steve Emke. Those stories were the hardest not only of this year but among the hardest things I’ve ever talked about on air.
If I look at the top ten topics, I find this. At number ten was the general topic of videos. Various YouTube items and other video stories. Nine was Print. As much as Print seems to be constantly on the verge of extinction, it registered five times as many stories as radio (which had a grand total of one). New Media was next. That’s a catchall for things like Hulu and Netflix and the Internet of Things.
The middle four slots were a logjam of topics that all tied with nine mentions here. My love affair with commercials was displayed, along with the Internet, the movies, and the news. I was a little surprised to find the news topic that low. It seemed like I talked about it a lot this year. But mid-pack is where it landed.
Number three on the list was technology. Set-top boxes and beacons were among the topics.
I’m going to skip over number two for a second and give a quick nod to the number one topic, which was television. It accounted for twenty-two programs this year.
The number two topic really jumped out at me. There fifteen programs this year that dealt with us and the media. By that, I mean how all of us interact and are acted on by the various media in our lives. It’s a category I believe will continue to be of interest moving forward.
I was kind of surprised that Facebook only popped up three times. Music finished in a three-way tie at two mentions each with comics and, of all things, copyright law!
My hope is that you’ve found the programs interesting and that you may have heard something useful along the way. I look forward to what 2017 will bring us.
Year in Review Part 2
Over the last couple years, I have made it a habit to take the final week of the year and look back at the topics we’ve discussed. Working from that list I’d like to spend a couple minutes looking ahead at what may be the biggest topics next year.
I’ll preface this by saying that soothsayers are notoriously unreliable. We always count on the shortness of the human memory to forget all the predictions that turn out to be wrong.
One thing seems to be clear to me. A great many historical standards for the media are going to take a hammering this year. At the top of that list is going to be mainstream journalism. I’ve said before that I intentionally avoid politics on this program, but it’s the political sphere that will do most of the hammering. Our President-elect has made quite clear, all through his campaign and following his election, his disdain for most of the mainstream media. He has also shown his intent to use new media, especially Twitter, in ways no major political figure has ever done, in the history of our nation. The closest parallel to President-elect Trump and Twitter is Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the radio broadcasts he called the “Fireside Chats”. Both are ways of circumventing the mainstream media and appeal directly to the nation.
In the second half of last year, I hope I was clear in my disappointment, anger, and dismay with the performance of far too many journalists. The industry and the nation are in desperate needs of journalism finding its way again. It’s not often that tell any portion of the media to look backwards rather than forwards, but I think a return to the standards of classic journalism would serve this part of the media best. The problem will not be in getting the journalists on board. The corporate ownership of most of the mainstream media is going to resist anything that reduces profits. And screaming headline, clickbait, dumbed down pseudo news is more profitable than intelligent reporting and objective analysis. I look to the future on this one without a great deal of optimism. As consumers of the news, we need to demand the change.
The one topic we studiously avoided discussing will continue to need to be treated carefully in 2017. The potential for a dramatic change in how the government approaches things like regulation of the media could mean that we will see change happening at an even faster tempo. This could result, and almost assuredly will result, in a great deal of confusion and chaos.
I won’t predict that I’ll have all the answers here. But I’ll try to make the issues clearer in the New Year.
New Year’s Wishes
As we wrap up the old year, why not take a moment to think about the new? Some wishes for the media and the new year from The View From the Phlipside.
First, I wish, hope and pray that journalism will begin the long slog back towards being journalism once again. I am enough of a student of the history of journalism in our country to know that there never was a time when this part of the media was a pure and perfect paragon of reportorial virtue. There have always been and will always be advocacy journalists and journalistic frauds. I also know that there was a time when these were seen as the outliers of the media. While the mainstream wasn’t perfect, it was worthy of our trust. Regaining that trust should be the focus of journalists at all level.
To achieve that wish will take an effort on our part as well. For the new year I wish that all of us, yours truly included, were a bit more skeptical and a bit more demanding of what we read and see and hear. And that skepticism was thoroughly exercised before we pass along any story or piece of information. Reject the idea that we live in a “post-truth” world. The best of this country and our ideals will not and can not be achieved through appeals to emotion over intelligence.
To get to that place we will need to work hard on my next wish, that we would all be a little bit more civil with one another. Less name calling and more discussion. Less flaming and more listening. Yes, we are living in a time of great change and division. And there are passionate discussions that need to be had. Whatever the future may hold, we will be better served if we remember that we are all part of one nation, one community, one neighborhood. It also doesn’t hurt to remember that the “great issues” of today are often forgotten footnotes just a few years later. Common civility can help us both in the near and far terms.
Finally, a word about my little corner of the media world. This first full year back has gone pretty well. Plus I published my first book this year! My hope is that you’ll continue to enjoy this program. A reminder that each week’s shows are featured on my podcast, which you can find at theviewfromthephlipside.com. In addition to the podcast, you’ll find commentaries on books and movies. Plus, beginning in mid-January or so, new video blog entries will be going up on topics of particular personal media interests. I hope you’ll enjoy them.
Until next year, I wish peace and joy and the media you desire.
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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