View From the Phlipside - Your News Decisons

 (My apologies for the sudden disappearance of the scripts to my show.  We've been working out a variety of issues at our new location)

 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.

A couple weeks ago I was commenting on the decision to invest many dollars and man hours into what I didn’t think qualified as a major news event, the Royal Wedding.  A friend of mine disagreed with that assessment and felt that it was worth all the time and money invested.  We’re still friends but we’ll have to agree to disagree.

But that conversation got a chain of thought going that came into full focus over this last weekend.  Your remember all the hoopla over this last weekend right?  This was the weekend that a small time Christian media mogul claimed the Rapture would take place.  At last check there don’t appear to be 200 million people missing from the world (that was his claim for how many would be going).  In fact at the moment I write this the only person who appears to be missing is Harold Camping himself.

The question for me isn’t why the media covered it.  It was worth a quick note and then move on.  No the real problem is that we, the public, didn’t move on.  So it’s our judgement of what’s news that I’ve begun to question.  Why did we, in a time when church attendance is generally down from a generation ago and edging slowly downward in most cases overall, get so hung up on this religious question?

In case you don’t really know much about the church stuff let me note that the Rapture thing is NOT supported by a vast segment of Christianity.  It’s a relatively new concept and has no roots in the original church.  In fact the support in the Bible for concept is seen as scant by most scholars.

And yet for most of last week it was a major topic of conversation and all the rage in the media.  My question is why?

Part of the reason I believe is that there is a great and unsatisfied spiritual yearning in our age.  But that’s a conversation for another place and time.  The other reason is that I think we’ve lost track of what’s really important.  Distracted by too many pieces of eye and brain candy we’re losing our palate for what the real deal tastes like.  There’s great danger in that trend.  So here’s the Phlipside test for future news decisions.  Ask yourself “How much of this is steak and how much is sizzle?”

Then order the steak.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2011