Phillipe & Jorge’s Cool, Cool World: JARheads, Candidates and Kudos & Congrats

JARheads 

Phillipe and Jorge are a bit late to the party concerning the Sinclair Broadcasting/Channel 10 debacle over shilling for President Pussy Grabber, but we’ve never been averse to putting the boot in once a man is down.

To be brief, Sinclair, which is owner of WJAR-Channel 10 and nearly 200 other local stations in the country, are professional Trump stalking horses, and remain a despicable member of the media. They coerced (no doubt with the threat of handing them a pink slip) their stations nationwide, including the JARheads, to put two of their on-air folks (in this case Frank Coletta and Alison Bologna) to deliver their distorted message. They then read, hostage tape-style, a screed that chastised “other” media outlets for airing the Orange Orangutan’s favorite fallback, fake news, while assuring us all that Channel 10 was above that. That flawed and arrogant presentation has been widely and rightly condemned in the national media, and locally in pieces by Urinal editor Alan Rosenberg and a biting Urinal op-ed by former TV anchor Dave Layman (see “Kudos and Congrats” below).

The problem here is the heavy-handed demand of all stations to put on the same holier-than-thou pontificating as a “must run” piece, along the lines of other Sinclair-mandated “must run” pro-Trump commentaries like those of Boris Epshtyn, a former Trump senior advisor, thundering on in a thinly veiled promotion of the president’s policies under the Sinclair flag. This was hilariously (and frighteningly) pulled together by the website Deadspin in a montage of dozens of stations, including Channel 10, rote reading the pre-scripted dialogue that reeked of Orwell’s Big Brother or a North Korean televised public appearance by Kim Jong-Un with the audience applauding like trained seals with the fear of a gun barrel being pressed against their temple otherwise.

The gun in this case is the offensive “no compete” clause in most all contracts for on-air personalities, which whether the person quits or is fired, prohibits them from appearing on another station in the same media market for a year. That means anyone who can’t make it for a year without getting a paycheck had either to suck it up or start rehearsing their “Would you like fries with that?” delivery.

As far as Alison Bologna is concerned, she is a very replaceable talking hairdo whom the JARheads could replace in a heartbeat. She no doubt understands that and was loathe to throw a career and salary out the window. But Coletta is a different story.

Frank is a local lad who famously appeared as a kid on the legendary Salty Brine’s children’s show on WJAR back in the Paleozoic, and has been an almost ever-present, recognizable and popular figure on the station’s airway since he joined the JARheads. His avuncular, warmly smiling presence on the morning news has become the face of Channel 10. P&J have also always considered him a friend, and have admired his work, as well as hearing through our backchannel sources at WJAR that he was a stand-up guy who has gone to bat for his co-workers when the situation demanded.

In this case, Coletta appears to have been on his knees rather than his hind legs. If there was anyone who could have stood up to Sinclair’s thuggish oafs, it was Coletta. There would be public outcry if he was axed for not kowtowing to his all-controlling masters at Sinclair, because as all Vo Dilunders know, we can criticize a home boy or girl, but you don’t let an outsider dare go after one of our own.

That is the reason why Coletta’s fall from grace impacts the credibility of the entire JARhead news department. If you can turn Frank, you can turn anyone. If we can’t trust our old buddy to just be a front man for a bunch of corporate media greedheads, upon whom can we rely? And the compromise is complete. You can’t regain your virginity, and you can’t be “just a little bit” pregnant.

Hey, Frank, how about a morning “coffee cup salute” to backing down? “The team you can trust”?  Right. About as far as you can throw them.

Sub-Genius Gubernatorial Candidates