“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 May 13, 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.
RIP Mike Joseph
It was my great honor and privilege to be one of the “front men” for several radio stations over the course of my career. Twice I was the morning man. The announcer in that slot tends to be the face and voice of the radio station for most listeners. It’s a lot of work but it was also an immense amount of fun.
It’s also important to remember that behind every voice is not just one person. There is a whole team of folks, most of whom you will never see, hear or know anything about, who have vital roles in creating the radio station, TV station, print or online media that you love. They don’t get nearly enough credit.
So I want to note the passing of one of the folks who not only kept radio stations on the air but shaped the way they sounded. The name Mike Joseph probably means nothing to most of you. Even for radio veterans, the name may ring no more than a dim bell. But if you ever listened to a station that billed itself as “Hot Hits”, you know Mike Joseph’s work. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, the format brought new life to the standby Top 40 format and led the way into the modern hit radio formats like CHR.
Joseph was born in Youngstown, Ohio. His radio roots were deep in the Top 40 format of the ‘50s and ‘60s. He had such success that by the time he was 29 he was the national program director for the Founders Group, whose stations ranged from Syracuse, New York to Honolulu, Hawaii. By 1972 he had turned around stations from Detroit, to Philadelphia to Hartford. He had helped to create the iconic sound of WKBW in Buffalo and WABC in New York City. Then came the first true “Hot Hits” station in Milwaukee. By the late ‘70s, the format was a huge hit throughout the northeastern United States. It featured a tight playlist of about 30 hit songs and nothing else. No recent hits and no oldies. The Djs were encouraged to talk about the local area, to make as tight a connection with the audience as possible. The streak lasted into the mid-80s when stations began to expand their playlists.
But Mike Joseph had changed the way you played the radio game. Millions of listeners knew his work, even if they never learned his name. It’s good to remember that it’s not just the folks in the spotlight making it all happen.
Mike Joseph was 90 years old.
Change Continues
It seems like there are a thousand and one awards handed out every year. And that number seems to keep growing. But I noticed that one of the old-timers in the media awards universe is adapting quite nicely to the new age.
The George Foster Peabody award is one of those that probably rings only a dim bell for most of the population, but it is one that is considered very prestigious in the media. Awarded since 1941, the Peabody has changed with the times before. Originally created by the National Association of Broadcasters to recognize excellence in radio broadcasting. Over the years it has adapted to include television and now online media. It is the oldest electronic media award in the United States. It is the broadcasting world’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.
This year the awards were dominated by a new category. Streaming media made up the majority of the winners in the categories of Entertainment, Children’s and Youth. Only a pair of shows from old school, linear TV picked up awards this year – NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and AMC’s “Better Call Saul”. The rest were dominated by the folks at streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Among the winners, there were Hulu’s “The Handmaiden’s Tale”, and Netflix’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events”. This isn’t the first time that streaming services have won. In years past, both Amazon and Netflix have won before. The difference this time around was how much they dominated in those categories.
And that shows that the folks at the Peabody Awards are paying attention.
I’ve talked before about the shift that the current generation of young people is bringing to the television world. A survey done this past spring showed that linear TV watching, that’s the kind of television you and I have been doing for decades, continues to decline among teens. It’s dropped to just twenty percent of their daily video viewing time. That’s down six percent over the last two years.
Meanwhile, services like Netflix, up two percent in the last year to thirty-nine percent, and YouTube, up four percent to thirty percent lead the way among streaming services. That’s a trend that no one can deny, nor should it be ignored. Baby Boomer’s parents were appalled at the amount of time their children spent in front of what was a fairly new media. That change is coming around again.
Think what you will about the trend, but if your job is recognizing the best in that universe, you have to take it into consideration.
We’ll call that a win for the Peabody Awards.
A Question of Transparency
Every week I scan through all kinds of stories looking for something of interest for this program. I will skim and reject about ninety percent of the stories I read. There are lots of reasons for it. Some of them are too complex for a program of this length. Some are outside my area of knowledge. Some are just boring.
This past week I was about to skim by a story about cable news network CNN being sued in Florida court. It involves a story from 2015 about a pediatric surgery center in Palm Beach Florida. Didn’t ring any of my bells for inclusion here. But the current fight in that court did. CNN is doing everything in its power to make sure that its internal editorial policies are not included in the official court record. When those documents were subpoenaed, the network produced a heavily edited version that was listed as “Attorney’s Eyes Only”. That means that the plaintiff, a surgeon who the original story claimed acted in a manner unfit for a doctor and surgeon, can’t see them.
That piqued my interest. Why would they fight so hard to keep those a secret? CNN claims they contain information that is “privileged, confidential and proprietary”. In the editorial policies? That made no sense.
A little further reading revealed that apparently the same attitude can be found at CBS, ABC and Fox News. The story I read said that NBC simply refused to answer the question. What is going on?
My confusion deepened when I discovered that folks like the New York Times, the Washington Post and even online news source BuzzFeed publish their guidelines in detail.
CNN, along with other news agencies, has demanded transparency from people and organizations in the news many times. The appearance that such a standard is for everyone else and not the network is appalling to me. I’ve spoken here before about the work the journalistic world needs to be doing to regain the trust of the public. Buzzfeed is clear that they publish their standards to, quoting now, “…keep BuzzFeed News writers, reporters and editors accountable to our readers” end of quote.
That’s exactly the stance that any news organization should take. Further research showed that many news organizations take that stance and have done so for years.
There have been questions about how CNN chooses to cherry pick when and how their standards apply. There shouldn’t be anything in those standards that couldn’t be shared with their viewers.
If CNN is unwilling to be transparent about how they cover the news, where do they get off demanding it of anyone else?
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 
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