Program scripts from week of March 5, 2012
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.
Intellectual Failure
I need to be a little careful with this comment. There are all kinds of mines in this field that I’m not interested in taking on as I try to reach my goal.
This past week saw two major events on the media playing field. The first was the death at 43 of conservative blogger Andrew Brietbart. The other was Rush Limbaugh’s calling of a Georgetown graduate student a “slut” and a “prostitute” following her attempt to testify before Congress on the subject of her university health insurance covering birth control.
Let’s be upfront about two things. My politics don’t agree with either of these two guys. That’s number one. Number two is that this isn’t about politics. It’s about journalism and commentary.
Andrew Brietbart maintained he was a journalist. The poor quality of his work on the Shirley Sherrod story a couple years ago shows that he really wasn’t. Journalism is a hard taskmaster. It’s attempting to get the facts right up front. It’s trying to get as close to the truth as possible. Brietbart was an advocate and there’s nothing wrong with that. But when your style is the kind of slash and burn approach to the facts you’re not a journalist.
As for Rush somewhere along the line the idea of an intelligent commentary on the issues seems to have been buried by a kind of intellectual bully boy-ism. A reasoned critique is rejected for personal attacks and vilification.
Neither of these guys are stupid. Yet they insisted on following an approach that not only made them look bad (just ask Rush what happens when you finally step over the line) but brings their point of view into disrepute as well. In both these cases I wonder if intelligence didn’t get drowned out by the ego boost of celebrity.
I want to note one last point. This is not a “conservative disease”. There are progressives who can be just as idiotic. At the moment none of them have achieved the media pinnacle to which Brietbart and Limbaugh have risen.
If there is good to come out of all this let’s hope that we can begin the process of walking away from the personal vitriol and back towards something radical, like issues.
Reality TV
I have a guilty TV pleasure. It’s reality TV. Not the most intellectual or artistic of television I will grant you but I watch it. I even watch a lot of it.
I’m trying to think of what got me started. Thinking back the first one I watched was “Cops” on Fox. Then the early seasons of “The Real World” on MTV. But in the last decade it seems like they are everywhere. Ice Road Truckers, The Osbornes, Deadliest Catch, Dog the Bounty Hunter. Most recently I’ve really gotten into Storage Wars and Swamp People. I’m trying to resist watching Axmen or Parking Wars but I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to resist.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit how many of these I actually watch. It doesn’t even include the ones I only sort of graze by like Pawn Stars or American Pickers. But recently I’ve come across one that just bewilders me.
In sitting down to write this commentary I had to do some self analysis about the ones I like. I’m much more a fan of ones showing people using skills usually related to their work. American Pickers and Storage Wars have a large slice of luck involved and that just doesn’t seem to grab me as deeply.
Then we have “Full Metal Jousting” on the History Channel of all places. I’ve watched a couple episodes and just don’t see the charm. The show is just what it sounds like if you haven’t experience this gem yet. It is jousting. Armor, lances, horses the whole nine yards. The idea is to knock the other guy off his horse with a big long stick. This was state of the art entertainment back in the 1600s. I’m just not sure what the allure is today. You can’t see the contestants because they are covered head to toe in armor plate. The collisions are generally visually uninteresting until someone goes flying. At which point the medical staff has to unbolt them from their personal canning so we can see how much blood may be flowing. There’s no connection to life in this millennium, it’s a blood sport where you can’t even see the blood most of the time.
I truly don’t understand why this would be considered entertainment. If you’ve got nothing better to do than watch this show than you really need to take a look at your life. Of course the same can be said for just about any of these programs. Storage Wars? Really?
TV Commercials
They are uniquely American even though we’ve shipped them all around the world. And it’s one of the few things that almost everyone agrees on. They are TV commercials and in general everyone hates them. But our question for today is what would you be willing to do to get rid of most if not all of them?
There’s an interesting story that’s just come out that newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin is one of us. He HATES TV commercials. Now one of the advantages of being a semi-legally elected leader of a major nation state is that you could actually DO something about them if you wanted. Putin claims that some state owned stations in Russia are so focused on their commercials that they aren’t giving enough time to important stories like murder, burglary and rape. I’m not making that up that’s what the Russian President said.
Now Russian TV averages slight FEWER minutes of commercials per hour than here in the U.S. The question is how to keep the money flowing that actually produces the TV shows we want to watch? We have commercial TV and the public TV model, there are hybrid models to consider. In England each TV owner pays an annual license fee for each TV set they own. End result - no commercials on the networks owned by the British government. Any of these models really appealing to you? Didn’t think so. In fact any Ron Paul type libertarians out there probably just had heart attacks. My apologies.
How about this one? In France, now everybody simmer down, French President Nicholas Sarkozy announced that he intended to eliminate ALL TV commercials by next year. Parliament said “Non” and limited them to just 5% of airtime, that’s about 3 minutes per hour.
The reality is that you have to pay for your TV one way or the other. Back in the days when we all got our TV “broadcast” it felt like “free” TV but it never was. Whether it’s membership fees or taxes or commercials in the end you pay the piper.
So the question is which is more fun? Reaching into your pocket to pay for TV one more time or watching the latest from Farmers Insurance? Bum da bum bum, bumbumbum?
Call that the View From the Phlipside.
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