“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 July 9, 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.
Kelly Struggles
It’s not often that I pay much attention to what’s happening Sunday evenings on television. There’s a pretty simple reason for that. For many years Sunday evening television fell into three categories: “60 Minutes”, “Sunday Night Football”, and “Who Cares?”. Seriously, Sunday evening is a good night to watch whatever is in your Netflix queue. Or nothing at all.
So when NBC announced that they would be putting their new talent, Megyn Kelly, into a Sunday evening slot, I had to scratch my head. Kelly had been a big deal at Fox after beginning her news career with ABC’s affiliate in Washington, D.C. She made her way quickly up through the ranks at Fox, becoming a highly visible anchor and commentator for the network. When her contract ran out last year, she announced she was moving to NBC to host several shows for the Peacock Network.
And even against the much weaker lineup of Sunday evening’s giants, Kelly has struggled. Just a couple weeks ago, people were screaming when she interviewed pseudo-journalist Alex Jones. Sponsors pulled out. In something of a stunning turnaround, Kelly did a solid job in that interview. But it hasn’t helped her ratings one bit. The first four weeks of the show saw ratings decline every single week. Now it’s not unusual for new shows to struggle a little, especially against established programs. Stephen Colbert struggled for almost a year before surging into the late night lead earlier this year.
But this was a big time gamble for both the talent and the network. Kelly reportedly turned down a significantly larger offer from Fox to take the seventeen million dollars a year offer at NBC. The network offered her a three prong opportunity to make the switch. That included the Sunday night program, work with the team covering national politics, and hosting a daytime program, scheduled to begin this fall.
I’m sure that the idea of the Sunday program was to give a “prestige” foundation for Kelly. At the moment, much to the delight of her critics, that foundation looks pretty awful. She shifted gears this past Sunday by stepping away from the “serious news” interviews like Vladimir Putin and interviewed pop star, Ed Sheeran. The serious stuff hasn’t helped much. It will be interesting to see if something a little “fluffier” might help. The good news is that she’ll probably be competing with a fair number of re-runs.
Sunday evenings are a tough time to compete. The early response seems to indicate that both Kelly and NBC may have made a mistake.
Newspaper Success
It’s funny. Just about every year for the last five or so, I figure that I’ve written my last program on the newspaper industry. That magnificent giant of another era has been dying by leaps and bounds for quite a while now. Newspapers have been a big part of my life, both personal and professional. Growing up it was the sports page and the funnies. As a broadcaster, I would scan through a couple of them every day to stay in touch with both the local, national and world news. Plus the sports page and the funnies.
Yet every time I think I’m finally done with the subject, something pops up that says newspapers aren’t quite dead yet. Just last month, folks in the media perked up their ears when they heard that one company had just bought most of the largest newspapers in Connecticut. A company that was expanding its paper empire and, astonishingly, seems to be making a profit in the business.
The company is Hearst, one of the oldest newspaper companies in the nation. Founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1887, the Hearst Newspaper Group now owns 22 daily papers and 64 weeklies. And they say they remain in acquisition mode.
And why not? Based on what little can be found out about the internal finances of the company, Hearst is privately held and very private about their company, they seem to have built profits in the group for the last five years. Now the larger Hearst company, known as Hearst Communications, Inc., is more than just a newspaper company. They have investments in print, television, and cable, which includes twenty percent ownership of ESPN. Plus their most profitable division deals in business information. The ten billion dollar a year company has made its way from the days of its glorious founder, who was the inspiration for the title character in the classic movie “Citizen Kane”, to today by being smart.
In terms of the newspaper division, that means keeping a long view of what they are trying to do and finding efficient ways to do it. That means they do what they can to keep operating costs low so that they can focus on content and sales. They are also investing in more newsroom staff, which is usually a place we’ve seen companies cutting. They are taking the approach that the best way to serve a local audience is to make sure that you are both covering the local news and know the local community inside and out.
When you put it that way, it sounds so simple. In fact, it was the basis of the old model for local media. It will interesting to see how the next five years turn out.
There may be a few more newspaper stories yet to come.
Who’s Smarter?
I want you to take a moment and think about all the movies you’ve ever seen where the machines suddenly gain self-awareness. The two that pop into my mind first are HAL in “2001- A Space Odyssey”, and, of course, Skynet in the Terminator movies. Computers that could think on their own, and had decided that humans were really just more trouble than they were worth. Pretty scary stuff.
In real world terms, we call that kind of stuff “artificial intelligence”, or more simply, AI.
If you think that’s all science fiction nonsense I would remind you that Stephen Hawking, the man who currently holds the unofficial title of the “Smartest Guy on the Planet” has stated that he believes the human race needs to leave the planet in the next hundred years. The reason? Because the machines will continue to get smarter and eventually will wipe our species out. Once artificial intelligence gets to the point that it can change on its own, that’s the tipping point where we need to get worried according to the professor.
So the story being reported in some outlets about a Facebook chatbot that has developed its own language may be worth noting. The social media company is looking to develop artificial intelligence devices to help it do things like removing extremist and violent messages from the service. The AI could do it much, much faster than humans. The problem is, as Facebook puts it, teaching the AI “common sense”. They’ve been using chatbots, which are computer programs designed to mimic human conversation using AI. The chatbots are trained by having them negotiate with other chatbots. As they got better and better, they began to develop in unexpected directions. For example, they learned to fake interest in one item of the negotiation in order to diminish the “cost” of what they really wanted. According to some reports, along the way, the chatbots actually created their own language, without any input from their human programmers.
If true, that would indicate a huge step forward in artificial intelligence. And that, of course, is where the scarier scenarios begin to percolate up out of our nightmares. Not all the experts agree that AI is about to come and wipe us all out. They note that this is a whole lot harder than the movies make it seem.
Of course, we need to remember that not all science fiction movies end up with the computers killing us. In “War Games”, the computer looks at the possible outcomes of destroying all life and decides that it’s a dumb game when no one wins.
So I guess we can hope.
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
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