Dr. Phil ‘intervention’ shows him as huckster he is
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, March 12, 2015, 5:22 PM
Dr. Phil Memo to Dr. Phil: It’s never OK to interview people on television when they are drunk and high.
The good “doctor” should have known that, but it’s worth repeating, given the debacle of Phil McGraw’s exclusive with Nick Gordon, Bobbi Kristina Brown’s boyfriend, whom McGraw and his team took perfect benefit of in an episode that aired Wednesday.
McGraw said the sitdown turned into an “intervention” when he realized Gordon could not speak rationally because he was high on booze and Xanax — but McGraw did not shut off his cameras.
Now he’s told various media outlets that Gordon is getting help. But that’s well after the TV shrink used the entire affair as a blatant grab for headlines, ratings and relevance. Worse, after he conducted the “intervention,” McGraw rationalized the choice to air the footage by saying it could help Gordon.
That makes McGraw an enabler.
McGraw told “Access Hollywood” that he went into the interview with good intentions.
“That was the whole purpose of going in, to talk to him about how he feels and what he thinks is going on and all the history about this whole situation,” McGraw told the show. “I get there, he’s not capable of giving an interview. He is out of control.”
And that, the good doctor should have known, was a BIG FAT RED FLAG. Airing footage from that disaster hurt McGraw’s image as a person someone might go to when he or she needs help. The Hippocratic Oath may not specifically bar doctors from exploiting patients for TV stardom, but the ethical imperative of “First, do no harm” seems to cover it.
McGraw should have shelved his footage and met up with Gordon when he was in a better state of mind. Instead this makes him look like a modern day, attention grabbing, P.T. Barnum — which is what he is.
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Get those scissors ready because it’s almost time to cut the cable cord.
With HBO and Showtime on the verge of launching standalone streaming services, a study by Nielsen found that more and more Americans are tuning out from habitual TV.
The only catch: sports.
So as tempting as it is to restore those cable boxes, in anticipation of someone figures out how you can watch your favorite games, TV will remain a destination.
Sure you can subscribe to websites run by the various leagues that carry games — but that gets high-priced quickly.
Meanwhile Nielsen found that habitual television watching is going downhill quicker than ever as streaming become a mainstream feature in American homes.
Adults watched an average of four hours and 51 minutes of live TV each day in the fourth quarter of 2014, down 13 minutes from the same quarter of 2013, which was already down six minutes from the year before, according to Nielsen.
At the same time, more homes are logging in to online video, with 40% of U.S. homes subscribing to a streaming service such as Netflix, Amazon Instant Video or Hulu, compared with 36% in the same period of 2013, according to Nielsen. Netflix is by far the most standard streaming service, in 36% of all U.S. homes, and Amazon Instant Video is in 13% of homes.
Those cable cords are looking might poor these days.
