Program scripts from week of June 2, 2013
(My apologies for the long silence. Life has been...complicated)
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.
Sports and Media
Time for one of my rare forays into the world of sports and media. And it all begins when a man loses his job. In this case the man in question is National Hockey League coach John Tortorella. Tortorella was, until recently, the man behind the bench for the New York Rangers.
Now on the surface it’s kind of hard to see why he lost his job. The Rangers were 171-115 and 29 in his time, made the playoffs 4 of 5 seasons he coached and finished first in their division just a year ago. Heck the Rangers signed him to a contract extension just a couple months ago. So apparently he’s not a terrible coach.
At least on the ice.
If you’re a hockey fan or a regular viewer of ESPN you have seen what the coach was bad at however. He gave awful media. Arrogant, dismissive, uncooperative, Tortorella made it clear that he’d rather be having the most unpleasant medical procedure you can imagine rather than talk to reporters.
The relationship between sports and media has changed immensely over the years. Once upon a time reporters considered covering up the personal shortcomings of the players just part of the job. More recently with 24 hour coverage the relationship has been often more antagonistic. The former Rangers coach isn’t the first sports coach to be, shall we say, less than forthcoming. New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick has made something of an art form of it. But Belichick manages to keep it at least civil. It’s more a mandatory social engagement with someone you don’t much like.
Here’s the reality. The old days are gone. Local coverage from print, radio and TV plus national coverage from the networks both broadcast and cable plus all the bloggers and vloggers are a part of the day to day life of athletes and coaches. You either need to figure out how to deal with them like a professional or find another profession.
I’m sure John Tortorella had some shortcomings as a coach on the ice. But my bet is that his shortcomings in the interview room are probably what cost him his job in the long run.
Trailer Wars
Interesting when you get two completely different groups of people to suddenly start saying the same thing at the same time. In my experience that’s when you need to start paying attention when they’re talking about you. In this case it’s the movie studios who need to sit up and pay a little attention. It’s not the movies themselves that are generating the conversation this time.
It’s the movie trailers.
Trailers are those movie previews that we watch before we get to what we actually paid to see. They’ve been around for decades. Like since 1913 when a short promo film for a musical called “The Pleasure Seekers” debuted in New York. They’re called “trailers” because orginally they were shown AFTER the movie. When they moved to their current postion shortly thereafter the name stuck.
So what’s the problem after all these years? How about the darn things have gotten too long? That’s the assessment of two different groups, the theater owners and the audience. A British research company called YouGov did a survey of audience members and found 49% said the trailers were too long and gave away too much of the movie. Meanwhile the theater owners think they’re just too long, period. With an average length these days of two and a half minute it just keeps pushing the start of the movie back and back and back. Which also annoys the audience. And there is no profit for the theater owners in an annoyed audience. Plus they’d like to limit the advance time for promotion to just four months. Right now you may be looking at teasers and trailers for movies that aren’t scheduled to be released until the summer of 2014.
You can certainly include me in the crowd that thinks these trailers are just too long and give away too much. At the same time I have to admit that the really bad movies are pretty obvious when you watch a long trailer. There’s just a feel to a trailer that has handed you every single funny moment in a bad movie. I kind of appreciate those I must admit.
At the same time I’m in the theater to see the movie I paid for, not something that’s coming in 10 months or to see a trailer that gives away any reason to pay for it when it does come out.
There’s a lot of conversation going on with people whose opinions count. Let’s hope the studios are listening.
Cheerios and Cowardice
I know the whole Cheerios TV ad has been analyzed to death. I doubt I have anything particularly new or exciting to add to the discussion. At the same time I think it’s one of those stories where every voice needs to be heard. We need to be clear that certain kinds of behavior just aren’t acceptable.
In case you missed it Cheerios is running an ad that involves a family of Mom, Dad and little girl. The little girl asks Mom about whether Cheerios are good for your heart like Daddy says. Mom basically agrees and little girl wanders off with the box of cereal. The last scene shows Dad with his chest covered in Cheerios. Cute. The source of the furor is that Mom is white and Dad is black. The immediate reaction in the comments section of YouTube was angry, abusive and overtly racist. While there was an outpouring of positive comments in reaction Cheerios wisely chose to turn off the comments and make them all go away.
Now let me be clear. I think the whole race-mixing, miscegenation argument needs to be consigned to the scrap heap of history. It’s the human race and it comes in different colors. I have no use for any other point of view. At the same time I defend our American belief in freedom of expression. The French author Voltaire said "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." and I agree completely. But he also said “We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.” And that’s where we may have lost the thread.
Freedom of expression does not mean that we can say whatever we want without fear of peril, risk and hazard. Our Founding Fathers knew it. That’s why the last line of the Declaration of Independence reads that they “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor,”. They accepted the risk in the words they said.
The problem with the Internet is that anonymity is taken as a right as well. Behind the cowardly mask of that anonymity things are said that dodge the risks and hazards. Those who exercise their bigotry under the flag of freedom of expression without being willing to take on the burden of those comments betray the very foundation of our country. As such they should be treated with the contempt that such behavior deserves.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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