“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 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from the week of April 1, 2018
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.
Whither Ratings?
Over the last couple years, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the changes in the media, especially television. Print changed the culture, radio changed the culture but I’m not sure either of them had the overwhelming impact that television did. It brought families together into a single room (you could listen to radio from the next room, and print is most often a solitary activity), and gave us not just the words or sounds of a different place but the sights of it as well. And for over half a century, television reigned supreme.
But television, and in this case, I use that term to talk about old school broadcast or satellite/cable TV, has been challenged by all kinds of new ways of viewing the kind of content that made it the king. And those new challengers are creating challenges for everything that has grown up around TV.
Think about how we chart the number of viewers for a television show, or network. Nielsen Media Research started doing the numbers for television in 1950. It was a fairly straightforward process. In the beginning, a home would only have one television set, and there were only a limited number of channels to watch. Using the techniques they had developed for radio, they figured out what we were watching and how many of us they were.
Modern viewing, which may involve multiple devices at the same time for an individual viewer, watching programs via traditional methods or streaming via the internet is creating all kinds of challenges for the folks who count viewers.
Here’s a memory for us older folk. Do you remember “Sweeps Weeks”?
Twice a year the networks would trot all kinds of “special” programming, crucial storylines for the series and the like to get the biggest audiences as possible. Why? Because the ratings from those months, usually May and September, were used to set the advertising rates for the networks. Today, the sweeps are nowhere near as important. There’s no way to try and load up those days with as many different media as there are today.
The question of how to measure the audience is still vitally important. Not just for advertising, but because the viewing audience for all the kinds of video entertainment, which includes television, is actually growing. The part that may bother you is that it will done through more data mining through our various smart TVs and more. What exactly that will look like is still under discussion.
Everyone knows something new is coming. Nobody has any idea what it will look like. Which is pretty much the way it always goes.
RIP Steven Bochco
Every so often we lose a real giant in the media. A name that may or may not mean a lot to many people, until you start mentioning the things they’ve done. On Sunday, television writer and producer Steven Bochco passed away. You have to pay attention to the folks behind the scenes to know his name, and he was something of a trendsetter in making those folks stars.
Bochco was part of the creative teams that created shows “Hill Street Blues”, “Doogie Howser”, “LA Law”, and “NYPD Blue”.
Bochco was born in New York City to a painter and a concert violinist. He would study theater and playwriting at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, one of the precursors to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.
From there he worked at Universal Pictures as a writer and later a story editor for shows like “Ironside” and “Columbo”. But the breakthrough was “Hill Street Blues” in 1981 for NBC. This was not just another police procedural like most of the shows that came before. The denizens of the Hill precinct were deeply flawed, and the world they lived in showed a level of grittiness we had only seen on the big screen before. It also had stories that carried over from one show to another, an unusual feature in television dramas other than soap operas. The show would earn 98 Emmy nominations and change the face of television. The ensemble nature of the show created a new kind of television and one that Bochco would return to over and over. Next up was “L.A. Law” which was an even bigger hit. In 1992, he took the grittiness of “Hill Street Blues” and upped the ante with “NYPD Blue”.
Not all of his projects were a success, but that can be said for anyone working in the media. Bochco was open to changes in the industry. He argued a decade ago that the home for high-quality drama as on cable TV rather than the broadcast networks. He also tried his hand at Internet TV around the same time with a 44 episode show called “Cafe Confidential”. Each episode was only sixty seconds long and consisted of unscripted “confessions” from real people.
It’s rare to create a work of genius. It is amazingly rare to have several on your resume. The work of Steven Bochco’s career can stand with anyone’s. He created programs that easily stand the test of time. For my listeners too young to have seen them I say, next time you need something to binge watch, look for these, perhaps especially the six seasons of “Hill Street Blues”.
Steven Bochco was 74 years old.
Sinclair Gets It Wrong
There are times when I’d really rather not be right. But I’m afraid that all my fears are coming true in this one story. A little while ago, I talked about my concerns about Sinclair Broadcasting’s growing presence in local television station ownership. They are trying to get approval from various governmental regulators for a merger with Tribune Media that would give Sinclair coverage of over seventy percent of all American households. My concern was that a single corporate entity with that kind of previously unheard of coverage could use it as a platform to influence the news.
And now it appears I was right to be worried.
Sinclair Broadcasting recently required their news anchors to record a script that took an editorial position on what was “fake news” and the threat it may hold for our country.
There’s been a lot of criticism of Sinclair since then. Some of it is nonsense in my opinion. Some folks have tried to tie the issue to President Trump. While the statement echoes some points the President has made, there is no reference to him at all. This isn’t about the President.
Sinclair Broadcasting is perfectly entitled to having, and airing corporate opinions on issues of concern. There is a long tradition of doing just that by local stations. Here’s the problem. There’s also a long tradition of separating the editorial and news portions of the station. In the old days, if a television station was running an editorial, it would be read by a corporate official. Not by the news staff. When an anchor would offer commentary, it was a senior member who was, in fact, an editor as well. And they were clearly delineated as opinion pieces.
The Sinclair piece is shown as a promo, and the news team members were given a “do it or lose your job” option. That’s what’s wrong with all of this. That’s where Sinclair gets it so wrong.
In an age when journalists have some of the lowest trust numbers in surveys of the public, this kind of enforced groupspeak only makes things worse. How can we ever trust those news teams again? Not so much because of their personal integrity, but because we will have to question if this is journalism or corporate propaganda.
Sinclair Broadcasting should have had a corporate spokesperson record the script and then broadcast it across their company. Instead, they chose to undermine journalism in general and their news teams in specific.
In every possible way, Sinclair Broadcasting got it wrong.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018
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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