“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 22, 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.
Doing It Right
I spend a fair amount of airtime on this program pointing out when people use media badly. So it’s nice when I can point to an example of getting it right, even when you get it wrong.
A link to the official Twitter feed of the Indiana State Police Public Information Officer for central Indiana popped up in my feed earlier this week. It was linked by someone I know who had noticed that this normally pretty dull, official feed had blown up. The officer in charge of the feed is Sergeant John Perrine (hope I pronounce his name correctly). In addition to the official posts on the feed, he had also posted some personal items as well. That’s good social media work for someone in his position. It makes them human and relatable, instead of just a talking head. On Sunday, he had posted a couple tweets about the NBA playoffs, specifically the game involving the Indiana Pacers.
That was where things went wrong. Sergeant Perrine tweeted
Unsurprisingly, the reaction wasn’t positive. Questioning authority is a pretty staple part of being an American. And it really sounded bad coming from a police officer. Lots of people pushed back.
And that’s when the Indiana Trooper showed his quality. Perrine immediately owned up to the problem. He noted that what he had said and what he had meant were two different things and that he had worded it properly. He noted that he just didn’t like seeing the constant complaining about every call. And he did it over and over. No blanket, boilerplate response. He responded to criticism after criticism with an honest acknowledgment of having messed it up.
By and large, that response was greeted with positive responses. People thanked him for and he received hundreds of likes for being honest and taking responsibility. The feed ran to almost four hundred responses and the likes far outdistanced that.
I’ll admit that the tendency for players to question seemingly every call that goes against them irritates me as well. Refs are necessary parts of the game. But they’re human and will make a bad call now and again. In more and more sports we’re seeing ever more advanced instant replay.
Sergeant Perrine showed us that all you really need to do is fess up to your mistakes. Well done, Sergeant, well done.
Local Is Hot
One of the things that was drilled into my head many years ago by the people who taught me about radio was that at the center of all things is the word “local”. News reporters were taught that “All news is local”. Which doesn’t mean that statewide, national and international news was to be ignored, but that what really interested people was how that news affected them in their home. I maintained that the way to beat satellite radio (back when that was something novel) was to offer the one thing they couldn’t, local news, weather, traffic, school closings. While we may have some intellectual interest in what is happening on the other side of the globe, in the end, it’s what happened last night two blocks from our home and family that really concerns us. The stations and personalities that found that balance where always the ones that had long-term success.
Turns out that some things haven’t changed. A couple of studies have popped up that seem to point to local still being a powerful force in the media. The Knight Foundation, a national foundation with interest in journalism and the arts, recently released a study of small and medium-sized television markets. What they found was that in those markets the local television stations were the go-to online locations for news. I will argue that the local involvement of those stations personalities with their communities makes them someone the viewer feels like they know. They can see them in the community and feel like they are neighbors. In a larger market, those equivalent personalities inevitably become “personalities”. The same kind of effect happens in local radio.
What really interested me was looking at the 2018 list of “Newspapers That Do It Right” published by Editor & Publisher, a professional journal that covers all aspects of the newspaper industry. The papers listed ranged from the Alexander City Outlook in Alexander City Alabama, with a circulation of only three thousand; to Newsday with a circulation of over two hundred seventy-seven thousand.
One concept kept popping up in their stories. Focusing on the local community. Bringing in local voices. Including local leadership in the decision-making process. It wasn’t the only factor, but it came up again and again and again.
It’s easy to just throw up our hands and say that local media is dead. That everything is going to be swept aside but automation and national feeds. But there is solid evidence that one of the oldest ideas remains strong. A tool that lets the little guys compete.
In the end, everything is local.
Ill Made Satire
There is a great line in the movie “The Princess Bride” that get’s a lot of use in my house. It is spoken by Inigo Montoya to the leader of the group that has kidnapped the Princess. He tells Vizzini “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means”. Sadly, I hear many instances in the media world of people using words in ways that the dictionary never intended.
Recently, I came across some folks trying to get out of trouble by explaining that they were just creating a satire or a parody. When you looked at their work, it was clear that they really had no idea what the words actually meant.
A middle school teacher in Florida ran a podcast that pushed a variety of white nationalist, antisemitic and racist points of view. When her on-air persona was revealed, she maintained that it had all been a satire. She has since resigned her position with the school district. More recently, an engineering fraternity at Syracuse University was permanently expelled and 18 members face disciplinary charges after a video filled with racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-disabled comments was discovered. Since then a second such video has also surfaced. The fraternity apologized but explained it was intended as satire.
And there we have the problem. Neither of the two examples is really satire.
So what is satire? The common definition is the use of humor, ridicule, or exaggeration to expose or criticize the behavior of a person, an institution, or even society with the intent of improvement. Parody is a similar form designed to imitate an artist or artistic work for comic effect. Too often today these words are simply used as camouflage for hate-filled attacks and diatribes.
Satire has been around for a long time. Most Literature students will be required to read Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” at some point. This was a satire of the English government and their lack of help for the people of Ireland during a famine in 1729. The proposed solution is pretty brutal and I’ll spare you it at this hour of the day. But it’s intent is clear and the exaggeration of the topic is clear as well.*
Mocking someone just to make fun of them isn’t satire. Satire is a carefully constructed literary work with a pointed purpose. Our most brilliant satirist of the last decade was Stephen Colbert on “The Colbert Report”. A brilliant skewering of modern American politics and culture.
He understood the meaning of the word perfectly.
*Swift proposed that to keep children from being a burden on their families and to make them a benefit to the larger society, they should be sold to the wealthy as food.
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
Stories Are My Life 
Leave a comment