“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 November 26, 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.
Media Thanksgiving
The week AFTER Thanksgiving may strike some as a non-traditional time to do a show on thankfulness but what can I say? It was over the holiday weekend that I got to thinking about the things in the modern media world for which I am thankful.
Media, especially this medium of radio, has been a wonderful part of my life for forty years. I first stepped into a studio at the old WCCB at Clarion State College in Pennsylvania. It was just for fun. I went to keep my brother company. Never meant for it to be a career, but it was the first step on a long and…interesting part of my life.
But in those forty years, the media world has changed so much. With that change has come so many wonderful opportunities. As with much in life, it also came with some pitfalls. But, for me at least, the upside is so much bigger than the down.
There are two areas that we should especially thankful for in my opinion. I’ve spoken before about the incredible opportunities there are for people with any kind of creative urge. Forty years ago, there were limited and often quite narrow avenues if you wanted to share your creativity. Now, if you’re a musician, a photographer, a writer, a painter, a jewelry maker, literally anyone who creates anything, your potential audience is the entire connected universe. It’s no longer just your local market. Your creative pieces can be shared around the world. And it can be at almost zero expense beyond the creation costs. This is a Golden Age like no age before it.
The other part of this media age that I am truly thankful for is social media. For all its many shortcomings, and I’ve spent plenty of time on this program discussing those, social media has been an amazing expansion of the size of our “neighborhood”. For me personally, it has allowed me to make friends all over the world, to connect or re-connect with family members who span the continent. Folks I may only see a couple times can be a daily part of my life now. And there is a special joy in those cases when I finally get to meet an online friend IRL – In Real Life.
As I write this, I am listening to a stream of a live performance recording of the Duke Ellington Orchestra playing “Take The A Train”. I’ve been texting with my brothers in Texas and California. Next up is working on a book project that, if I ever complete it, I will publish independently.
There are plenty of flaws in our modern media world, but there is so very, very much for which I am truly thankful.
Still More Stupid
Leading into Thanksgiving week, some of us were inflicted with what has become my least favorite media circus. For those of us on Dish Network have had to live through another carriage battle between a service provider and a content provider. In this case, it was Dish and the folks at CBS.
As usual, the battle was how much the service provider should pay for access to the content of the content provider. In specific, CBS was trying to leverage the overwhelming popularity of its broadcast network programs to get a higher price for its smaller cable only networks. CBS has been a solid ratings leader for years now. So they know that the content providers are over a barrel when it comes to having to carry them. So they wanted more money and required that Dish carry their three cable networks. CBS Sports, Smithsonian and Pop. Never heard of that last one? Me either. Once upon time it was the Prevue channel, and then TV Guide channel. Now it’s a general entertainment channel that is run as a partnership by CBS and Lionsgate Entertainment. It’s another of the rerun channels.
Would you be surprised that DISH didn’t want to pay extra for a network like that? Neither am I. And so the usual stupidity began. Each side claiming that the other was doing terrible things to the viewers by being so unreasonable. As always, neither side gave a rat’s butt about the viewers.
In fact, this battle took a new and idiotic turn. DISH asked viewers to contact CBS’s local advertisers to put pressure on the network to “end the dispute”. Thereby dragging another group into the middle of a dispute that doesn’t really have anything to do with them.
The standoff ended right after Thanksgiving with a new multi-million dollar agreement between the party. What brought them to their senses? A couple million really ticked off viewers. You see once CBS pulled the plug on airing the network to the four million or so DISH subscribers, they ended up missing some NFL action on Thanksgiving Day. It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to conjure up the kind of anger that was unleashed on both parties. The Twitterverse did what it does so well, vent, loud and long.
The best news to come out of all of this may be that it focuses on the best possible response to the next time, and trust me, there will be a next time, that a pair of media titans decide to knock heads. Once again, I guarantee you, they will attempt to drag us into the middle.
At which point we need to look them both squarely in the eye, and tell them exactly what we think.
On Net Neutrality
You don’t have to follow the media the way I do to be exposed to the two hottest words out there right now – net neutrality. I also understand that for a lot of people this issue is the same as my stance on carriage wars between service and content providers. You ask yourself “Why do I care? It has nothing to do with me!”
My contention is that you should care, because it absolutely has to do with you.
First of all, when the vote on net neutrality comes up, on or around December 14th, the changes are virtually certain to pass. All it takes is a majority of the commissioners on the FCC. And that majority absolutely exists.
So why should this concern you? Where to begin?
Removing the net neutrality rules will allow your internet service to be sold to you the way your cable service is. You know, where you pay extra for all kinds of things you DON’T want in order to get what you do. And where you pay extra for the stuff beyond the basic. Which will be presented to you in bundles. A social media bundle, a streaming video bundle, et cetera, et cetera. Sounds like a great system, right?
How about this? The next time a hot new application or web service comes along, and you discover that the corporate owner of your service provider has a competing service. And they throttle the competition to make their service look better. Does that sound like the way you want your internet to work? Where the company decides which service you should have access to?
How about this, the arguments that net neutrality should be repealed because they are limiting corporate profits and investment are false. Look up the company profits, they are very healthy. And investment in infrastructure has actually INCREASED under net neutrality over the time period before the rules.
Finally, all the major players on the internet, folks like Google and Facebook and Twitter, are in favor of retaining the rules. Why? Because it helps to ensure that there is a level playing field for companies.
In the end, the only people who seem to find a benefit in this are the service providers. Net neutrality is designed to protect us and our access to as open an internet as possible. Repealing the rules puts us at the mercy of corporations whose primary focus is on the highest possible profits.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
Contact the FCC with your thoughts on the subject, while you can.
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
Stories Are My Life 
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