“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 and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of April 23, 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.
Block That Ad!
A literary quote to start us off this time. “You say I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.” That’s from Walt Whitman’s 1855 poem, commonly called “Song of Myself”. In this case, I am pointing the great American poet’s pointed barb at myself.
Over the years on this program, I have noted that the idea the everything on the internet can or should be free was silly. Someone has to pay for them and the logical person to do is the user. Meaning you and me. There are two tried and true ways to do this, with a subscription or with advertising. For the record, I pay for exactly one, a Pittsburgh-based sports service that I’ve mentioned before. I don’t see that number changing much any time soon. So the obvious next step is that I pay through advertising on the sites I use.
But here comes my Whitman moment. I use an ad-blocker on my browser. A piece of software designed to eliminate advertising. So, yeah, contradiction.
The question of ads and ad blockers is growing in the media world. The folks who produce the materials we see expect to get paid for their services. This is why the online version of The Atlantic magazine has added a hard wall to ad-blockers. Want to read their well-written prose? Either tell you ad-blocker to let the ads pass, which is called whitelisting, or pay for a subscription. Otherwise? In the word’s of Gandalf the Grey, “You Shall Not Pass!”.
Meanwhile, a new player in the ad-block universe has people concerned. Reports say that Google is planning an ad-blocker in a future version of its web browser Chrome. While there are perfectly innocent uses for such a function, online publishers are concerned about the level of control over their ads this would give to the company that already controls a vast percentage of online advertising. There’s also concern that this may simply be a way to force their competitors to pay Google to “whitelist” their ads. You’re not hearing a lot of comment on this for the simple reason that businesses are afraid to cross the internet giant unnecessarily.
At the end of the day, we have to pay. Any website that notes my ad-block and asks me to whitelist them gets my instant cooperation. I figure it’s the least I can do to try and keep the whole digital economy bouncing along. It may not resolve the whole contradicting myself issue, but I’m still working on that.
Sympathy For Cable
I don’t say this often, in fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever said it before, but I have started to feel a little sympathy for cable companies. No, I haven’t lost my mind, it’s just that their life is pretty tough these days.
You can begin with the fact that cable companies are among the least liked corporate entities in our culture. A survey last summer by Consumer Reports placed several of the biggest cable and internet providers at the very bottom of the list when it came to customer satisfaction and value.
Which is interesting to me as well. One of the more common complaints about these services is their price. You would think that offering lower priced services could improve consumers view of value and make it appear that the companies were responding to customer demand. With the growth of the cord-cutting movement, I’ve discussed before this would seem to be the obvious move.
Well, this is one of those places where I begin to feel some sympathy for the cable companies. Because it’s not that easy. There’s a simple solution to making lower priced cable packages. Drop sports. The sports networks and general sports coverage are routinely the most expensive items that have to be paid for.
What kind of cost difference? Some experts say a basic package could be as low as twenty dollars a month, others say that a sports-free package of up to one hundred channels could be offered for thirty-five dollars. At that price, other experts claim that the profit margin for these packages could be in the thirty percent range.
So why do I feel sympathy for the cable companies? Because of the big television production companies, folks like Disney (which owns ESPN) and the broadcast networks, want no part of a world that cuts out their big money makers. Disney has already sued one cable company for offering a sports-free package. Contract language requires that all their networks be included in the most popular channel bundles. That could limit the number of sports free bundles that are available. The cable service providers find themselves in something of a damned if they do, damned if they don’t situation.
As a baseball, football, hockey, international soccer and Formula One racing fan myself, a sports-free package just won’t work. But I know plenty of folks who would leap at cutting their TV service bills by dropping what my daughter refers to as “sportsball”.
So, without absolving the cable companies of all their mistakes that make us generally dislike them so much, not everything is completely in their control. Our best bet is to continue making enough noise to get all the players listening to us.
Fake News
There has been a lot of talk over the last year about “fake news”. More often than not it’s simply a shorthand way of trying to discredit information that doesn’t match a person or company’s point of view. That doesn’t mean that fake news doesn’t exist. Even fake news can have an impact.
I think we can divide fake news into a couple categories. There is the flat out made up stuff. In the old days, we would simply call them lies. More subtle than that are the stories that take something out of context. Whether it’s a clickbait headline that takes one small aspect of a story and makes it look like it’s the center, or simply choosing to highlight only certain portions of a story, rather than the full story, these are also fake news.
Some news is easy to report. Car accidents, press conferences by politicians, these are all pretty straight forward news. They are less likely to result in fake news (although it does happen). What about stories that involve very different points of view? Investigative journalism traditionally has worked very hard to avoid fake news, even before it was called that. Reporters were expected to find at least two independent sources for a fact before publishing it. That was the fake news filter.
This all sprang to mind because of a story circulating around Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat. Last week a huge furor arose around the social media app, based on the claim that Spiegel had said he didn’t want to see growth in India or Spain. The supposed logic was that the app was for rich people. Folks in India were, unsurprisingly, upset. There was a push to delete the app and give it negative ratings. Its stock took a short term hit in value as well.
Here’s where it enters into the “fake news” discussion. Snapchat has denied the statement was ever made. The only source for the quote is a court filing, based on the testimony of the man who filed the suit. That’s right, a former employee who is suing Snapchat is the only source for the story. One that has damaged the company both from image and financial points.
Is it true? Don’t know. The fact-checking group PolitiFact looked at the story and rated it “Mostly False”. Additional facts later may change the story.
But at the moment, this is what fake news looks like.
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
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