“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 September 23, 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.
Farewell AM Radio?
In the beginning, of electronic media that is, there was radio. Back then you didn’t have to designate what kind of radio. There was just “radio”, and that radio was AM. In case you ever wondered, AM stands for Amplitude Modulation versus FM which is Frequency Modulation. And I’ll be honest right now, after more than 40 years in and around radio, I don’t understand what either of those two concepts really mean. And the whole question may be moot sooner rather than later.
Now, you may think I’m going to talk about some internet pseudo-radio kind of thing that is going to push traditional radio out the door to the curb. That day may still be on the horizon, but that’s not the topic of the day. No, I bring up the grand old medium of AM radio for a reason. It’s days may be numbered.
I predicted that the original commercial radio band was headed for the dumpster when the FCC refused to designate a standard system in 1982. What followed was a mess, and AM stereo, seen a necessary tool to compete with the better audio quality of FM radio was a dead letter by 2001. But AM has managed to cling to life.
That may be coming to an end.
About ten years ago, smaller broadcasters got a deal from the FCC. They could simulcast their AM stations on FM repeater stations. The idea was to keep the AM band alive. Now a small group owner in Arizona, Casa Pinon, has asked for permission to take an AM station off the air for a year. KSVL is a 5,000 watt daytime and 87 watt night time station in Show Low, Arizona. For that year, they would make the FM translator station a Class A facility, meaning it would be treated like a “real” radio station. The stated goal in the case before the Commission is to test audience and advertiser reaction to only having an FM version covering the town of just over 10,000 people. And in the long run, see what kind of impact on the financials of the station would take place.
As always, the bottom line is the bottom line. The average age of AM listeners is now 57, and only tiny fractions of listeners under the age of 24 ever listen. Broadcasters are not going to want to pay to keep multiple stations open if there are no listeners.
And that could mean that the long and distinguished run of AM radio is coming to an end.
On A Break
In relationships, the term “on a break” usually indicates some serious issues between the people involved. Time is needed away from one another so everyone can reassess the situation. More often than not, it seems like it’s the first step to ending a relationship that isn’t working out.
So the folks at Facebook can’t be thrilled with the results of a study done, by the folks at the Pew Research Center. The study followed the revelation that Cambridge Analytica had gathered a large amount of personal data from Facebook users at the time of the 2016 election without proper permission.
What the study shows is that Facebook’s bad year isn’t getting better any time soon. In addition to questions about whether it is censoring content from certain parts of the political spectrum, to increasing discussions of governmental regulation both here in the U.S. and in Europe, 2018 has been a year to forget for the social media giant.
In a relationship, too much “drama” can be a drag. It looks like a sizable portion of Facebook’s user base is feeling the drama quotient is getting too high. The study, conduction from the end of May to around mid-June, shows some pretty scary numbers.
Twenty-six percent of users, in large part younger users, have deleted the Facebook app from their smartphones. If you look at that age demographic, in this case, 18 to 29, the numbers are worse. Forty-four percent of those users, a group that is heavily invested in their phones, dropped the app.
But about that “taking a break thing”. I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing Facebook friends doing that on a regular basis. From a couple days to a full month, some of my friends are stepping away from social media. And they’re not alone. Forty-two percent of adults surveyed said that they had taken a break from Facebook at some point in the last year.
A survey done by the search platform DuckDuckGo showed that more than a quarter of surveyed users were seriously considering dropping the social platform altogether. Fifty-four percent said they had some level of a negative trust issue with Facebook.
In the face of all this, I continue to be surprised by how slowly the Zuckerberg legions continue to move on making changes. We keep getting assurances that they plan to/will/are fixing the various issues that face them. They promise that they’ll change.
But then, isn’t that what you always hear when you decide it’s time to take a break?
Now Some Good News
It’s nice to have something nice to say for a change. It seems sometimes, even to me, that so much of the news both in the media and about the media is bad. One more problem, one more mistake, one more step away from being the best and the brightest that folks like me want and that all of us need.
So I get to sit here with a big grin on my face, because I have a story about the media and about journalism in specific that is very, very good.
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a non-profit school for journalism in Florida. They not only train leaders in American journalism, they are watching the journalistic arena and reporting on it. One of the things they do is the Poynter Media Trust Survey. This survey of Americans shows that the decades long slide of trust in the press is showing some positive numbers for a change. And there’s one area that still has the trust of a vast majority of American consumers.
You’ll find that outlet close to home. It is local media that scored so high in the latest survey. Some 76 percent of those surveyed put their trust level in local television somewhere in the two highest categories. For local newspapers, the score was 73 percent. National television news managed only 55 percent, national newspapers scored a 59, and online news sources finished below the half way mark at 47 percent. I was rather grumpy to note that Poynter apparently did not ask about local radio. But I decided I was going to stay with the positive as much as possible.
There is still a rather lukewarm attitude toward the media overall. Approval ratings linger a hair over the 50 percent mark when discussing mass media. I’ve mentioned before that there is a political split when it comes to this question. And that’s another interesting note in the Poynter study. When it comes to local media, that political split largely goes away. The director of the Trusting News Project, a group that works with news organizations to build trust in their communities, the study, quoting now “…really underscores that local and national news are different animals…”
Those local news approval ratings are in the range of the highest numbers recorded about the media, from Gallup reports dating back to the mid-70s. And it’s a huge improvement over the all-time low numbers, also from Gallup, of the low 30s in 2016.
After all these years, it’s nice to have some good news to report.
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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