“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 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of February 20, 2017
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.
RIP “The Animal”
One of the changes in our world that the media has created is the number of “celebrities”. Over the decades it has become easier and easier to be famous. Equally, the threshold for fame has gotten lower and lower. The real pivotal medium for this change was television. Suddenly there were hours upon hours of programming to be filled. Out of that bounty came many big stars. But there also came galaxies of little ones as well.
The death of a high school teacher, even a good one, rarely gets much attention outside the district where they taught. But following the death of retired Michigan teacher William James Myers last week, remembrances popped up everywhere. While Myers had been a Michigan Sports Hall of Fame coach, his celebrity came on the television. It came under the name of George “The Animal” Steele, one of the great names in professional wrestling.
I remember watching Steele as a kid on “Studio Wrestling” on channel 11 in Pittsburgh. He was the brutish bad guy who had a long rivalry with champion and local hero Bruno Sammartino. Steele’s character, even from the beginning, was a brute. He lacked any finesse as a wrestler, that was the champ’s forte, relying simply on pure animal strength. Over the years he would continue to refine that character, with his bald hairy and incredibly hairy body adding to the image. Steele would wrestle from 1967 to 1988, moving from the simple innocence of those Studio Wrestling days to the birth of big time professional wrestling with Vince McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation. It would take him the world of the “heel” or bad guy to the good guy “babyface”.
Jim Meyers meanwhile was an articulate and well-educated man. He prided himself on how well he could do out of the ring interviews. It was only in the McMahon years that he completely moved into the inarticulate mental defective character for which he is best remembered. He was a high school teacher in Michigan who took up wrestling to bring in a little extra money. The move to Pittsburgh was the big step for him into the spotlight of television celebrity. He would wrestle at Madison Square Garden and Fenway Park.
Professional wrestling as we know it today has been around since the 19th Century, but really only came into its own with the advent of, you got it, television. It is television that allowed a sideshow entertainment to suddenly become a major event.
Along the way, it created a whole new category of celebrities. I’m not sure the world is a better place for having George “The Animal” Steele. But it sure was more interesting.
William James Myers, George “The Animal” Steele was 79 years old.
We All Agree!!
You may find it astonishing but I think I found two topics, both having to do with the media, that we, the American people, are actually mostly in agreement about at this point. As astounding as that seems, it appears to be true.
The first is that a comfortable majority of voters support continued funding for PBS. A recent bipartisan phone poll recorded that sixty-two percent of Republican voters and eighty-three percent of Democrats oppose an end to funding. PBS is seen as an important education tool for our schools and scored much higher confidence numbers than the broadcast networks. In fact, public television came close to doubling the commercial network numbers.
Having faith in our media is important. Which brings us to the second item of agreement. My bet is that its approval ratings are significantly higher that PBS’s. I’m pretty sure there is close to complete agreement that fake news is a bad thing. It doesn’t matter what you personally qualify as “fake news”. Pretty much no one thinks it’s a good idea.
And yet, somehow, the folks at Twentieth Century-Fox studios didn’t seem to get that memo. As part of the promotional campaign for the new movie, “A Cure for Wellness”, the promotional team created a series of websites that were made to look like news sources. They came with perfectly reasonable-sounding names like The Sacramento Dispatch,The Houston Leader, The NY Morning Post and The Salt Lake City Guardian. On each site, you would find at least one story about a “fake disease”. The plot of the movie is about a fake health spa. Instead of mixing those in with real news, the promotional team just had some fun and made up their own. President Trump and Vladimir Putin had been seen at a resort prior to the election, Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show had been a tribute to Muslims. Even fake weather reports.
The problem was that there was no way to “get the joke”. Movie studios have set up websites in the past to promote movies, even making ones that appear to be real companies. But there was always what the card players call a “tell”. Something that made you go, “wait a minute”. After initially defending the campaign, Twentieth Century-Fox has acknowledged that it was all a huge mistake. That becomes apparent when you look at the box office numbers for “A Cure for Wellness”. The movie opened this past weekend and finished the four-day holiday in eleventh place. That’s pretty painful. If you’re going to do something dumb, you at least want to get people interested.
In the end, it seems like we WANT to spend money on news we can trust and not on people peddling fakes. Seems like a pretty simple lesson to me.
Old vs New
Any time the old, established way of doing something bumps up against the “next big thing”, sparks fly. The status quo never wants to give that status up, and the young Turks are going to do their own thing, like it or not.
This isn’t a new thing. How about this quote from the 1950s? “[It is} the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear…”. The speaker? Frank Sinatra. The subject? Rock and roll.
I believe that is a lot of the underlying issues currently boiling over involving YouTube sensation PewDiePie. His real name is Felix Kjellberg, and he is the biggest star on the video website. Big as in fifty-three million subscribers and around fifteen million dollars a year. He’s been in the news these past couple weeks for a completely different reason.
The Wall Street Journal did a story on him, identifying nine different videos that contained some form of anti-semitic “joke”. They asked the question, is the biggest star on a YouTube anti-semitic? Kjellberg reacted by accusing the newspaper of a smear campaign. Here’s the bottom line for me. It’s clear the YouTuber was trying to be edgy and funny. How he didn’t see this reaction coming is beyond me. Since the article, he has acknowledged that the jokes were wrong and apologized. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal clearly takes at least one image completely out of context.
So what’s really going on here? It’s the latest chapter in that story I mentioned before. The status quo has the money, the new guys want the money. The new guys are edgy, daring, breaking new ground and stomping on social norms. The status quo expects everyone to behave. Fireworks are inevitable.
PewDiePie has become a big star because he’s outrageous. His humor is sophomoric, and his language is heavily laced with obscenities. To the media status quo what he does makes no sense at all. And he has fifty-three million followers. The status quo wants access to that following but somehow expected that it could be made into a nice, neat “Leave It to Beaver” package. The Wall Street Journal story cost the YouTube star a contract with Disney and profitable placements with YouTube and Google.
In the end, both sides need to compromise. Even Rock and Roll eventually “sold out”. PewDiePie’s claim that he is somehow “not news” is an astonishing piece of naivete. The Wall Street Journal chose a shallow approach to the subject that guaranteed clicks over good analysis.
At the end of the day, both the mainstream and the new guys need to understand that survival will require both of them to behave better than they have here.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
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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