“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 September 17, 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.
What Is Facebook
So here’s the question of the age. What exactly is Facebook? That may sound like an astoundingly obvious question, but I’m not so sure it is. What began as a way for students at Harvard to get to know one another is expanding in multiple different directions all at once. The brain trust at the media giant spends a lot of time telling us what they are not, a publisher for example, or a news organization, but what exactly they are isn’t very clear either.
Here’s an example. Is Facebook television? Most of us would respond pretty quickly in the negative. While there are video elements of the service and those elements are definitely on the rise, the idea that Facebook is TV seems to be a stretch to me. So explain how Facebook has an Emmy nomination this year. The Emmy Awards are presented by three organizations, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Get the common thread there? Yet at this past weekends Emmy Awards the Facebook Live broadcast of Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU with Tom Hanks was in the running. So, at least according to the people of the Television academies, it appears that Facebook is at least partly television.
The ongoing debate is about Facebook as a news source. The powers that be at the social media network say they are simply that, a place where people can share items that interest them. At the same time, Facebook is changing the rules on how some of those stories are presented. Advertisers used to be able to change headlines and descriptions of news stories to spin it in whatever direction they’d like. The Wall Street Journal finally protested to Facebook, saying that the practice was distorting their work. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the advertising side, the folks at Pro Publica found that the legendary Facebook algorithms were generating fun little advertising niches, like “Jew Hater”. Once again, Facebook has had to backpedal furiously and promise to fix the issue.
The real problem here is that no one expected Facebook to be, well, Facebook when it launched in 2004. It was going to be fun and social. Today about twenty percent of the American public uses Facebook as a primary news source. The service is under investigation by the Special Counsel concerning ads sold to a Russian agency that may have tried to influence our last election.
What is Facebook? The exact answer is still being developed. But it’s clearly an 800-pound gorilla sitting in the middle of our media lives. So it’s important that we find that answer, sooner rather than later.
ESPN Stumbles
Sometimes it’s hard being the “Worldwide Leader”. Being the king of the mountain means that everyone is gunning for you. Everything you do is scrutinized and in our current culture, criticized. It only makes it worse when you actually do dumb things and give people room to criticize.
For the “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” it’s been a rough couple of months. Just a couple weeks ago there was the avoidable silliness around part-time announcer Robert Lee. Then last week at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference CBS’s top dog, Leslie Moonves, criticized ESPN. He said he wanted more sports and less shouting. I can agree with that point of view.
But then the big storm hit. ESPN anchor Jemele Hill tweeted some critical remarks about President Trump. She called him a white supremacist and implied that most of the people who voted for him were as well.
Does she have the right to say those things? Absolutely. Protected political speech. But as I have pointed out many times before, the Constitutional protection is to keep the GOVERNMENT (and that includes the President) from trying to restrict speech. There is no Constitutional protection from your boss deciding to fire you. Or your sponsors to decide to stop sponsoring you. At the moment, neither of those things have happened. Hill has apologized for putting her employer in a tough situation. The network has distanced itself from the comments. We’ll have to see what happens next.
Here’s the bottom line issue. Most of us watch sports to get us away from day to day issues. Like politics. At the same time, politics and sports have been hand in hand for a long time. American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the ‘68 Olympics, Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, Hitler and the Berlin Games of 1936. Even the ancient games had political overtones. So the idea that once sports was this pure, politically unsullied concept doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. At the same time, while Colin Kapernick is a legitimate crossing point between the two worlds, I’m not sure that I much care what a sports anchor’s political views are in general. We listen to Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson for politics.
If I had to point out the problem at ESPN, I would say it’s because they seem to emphasize commentators over reporters these days. In fact, they paid Hill to comment on social issues on the show “His and Hers”. So maybe they shouldn’t be surprised when she kept doing what she’d been doing. Or, in the words of basketball Tiger Dad Lavar Ball, maybe ESPN needs to get everyone to “stay in their lane”.
Time To Listen
One of the most important factors in making communication work is knowing that half the process needs to be listening. Author, educator and speaker Dr. Stephen Covey has said “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply”. For years there has been a complaint from the middle of America that the media has no idea what the average American really wants. That the news and entertainment industries are so caught up in their own little bubbles “on the coasts”, that they never hear another voice.
Not getting outside the bubble can have serious repercussions. Just ask the folks at the startup originally to be called “Bodega”. The company was going to have mobile little convenience stores, that would take direct aim at the kind of mom and pop stores often called bodegas. There was a huge backlash and the founders had to acknowledge that, quoting now “…that we may not have been asking the right questions of the right people”.
So I give a lot of credit to the folks at Huffington Post. Last week they launched their “Listen to America” bus tour. They will visit twenty five cities that, as one pundit put, only see national news coverage when they are on fire or under water. They are reacting to the very real issue that trust in the media has hit rock bottom. Quoting from their website – “ We hope to rebuild some of that — and learn from – by listening to the public…”
The launched in St. Louis, and wind their way mostly through the south, the rust belt, and western states before winding up in New Orleans at the end of October. This is not a “flyover country” tour either. They are on a bus.
The goal will be to conduct many, many interviews of regular people and public officials. To note the themes, concerns and trends that pop up in those interviews and to let them shape the coverage.
The quality of that reporting remains to be seen, the bus hasn’t visited a handful of locations yet. But the idea is solid, in my opinion. Charles Kuralt validated the road trip as a great way to get to know America up close and personal with twenty five years of “On the Road” reports for CBS. The major media could do a lot worse than spend some time with the non-coastal America again.
The real question is this. Is this all just a publicity stunt, or is Huffington Post really prepared to listen, and internalize the lessons they are learning? That would be a huge step toward restoring some level of trust between the media and the nation.
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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