Sitting high above the Loop with Newton Minow, I realized that history buried his lede — to his everlasting good fortune.
“Burying the lede” is newspaperese for sticking a story’s main point too far down. It partly explains why Monday brings the 50th anniversary of a speech that is now part of the cultural lexicon: “A vast wasteland.”
That’s how he referred to television on May 9, 1961, in his first address as chairman of President John F. Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission. One can’t imagine regulatory chiefs or cabinet officers today speaking so harshly, and forthrightly, to an industry they oversee.
The real message that Mr. Minow, then a 35-year-old Chicago lawyer, wanted to impart was that in exchange for free and exclusive licenses to use the airwaves, bona fide “public service” programming should be provided by broadcasters, whom he addressed and angered at their national gathering in Washington. “Vast wasteland” was a parenthetical term.
The immediate news coverage, and history, thought otherwise. The next morning’s New York Times heralded the speech on the front page: “F.C.C. Head Bids TV Men Reform ‘Vast Wasteland’ — Minow Charges Failure in Public Duty —Threatens to Use License Power.”
The “men” were outraged. The producer of the lowbrow classic “Gilligan’s Island” named a sinking ship after the young lawyer, coyly spelling it S. S. Minnow.
Yet the potency remains of Mr. Minow’s excoriation of “a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons.”
“No, I could never have anticipated” the impact, Mr. Minow said last week. It was a speech given before the birth of President Obama. He later gave Mr. Obama, a Harvard Law student, a summer job at his firm, which led to Mr. Obama’s meeting his future wife.
“Vast wasteland” may be in the first line of Mr. Minow’s obituary, and three high-achieving daughters joke that his tombstone will be inscribed “On to a vaster wasteland.” It has slightly obscured a distinguished legal and public-service career, with the hitching post being the Sidley Austin firm.
He still sees television in a Dickensian best-of-times, worst-of-times light. He believes there should be hefty financing for noncommercial TV, whose growth he accelerated as F.C.C. chairman. His favorite shows are “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and “Chicago Tonight” on WTTW Channel 11 and, on Friday, he spoke at a memorial service for William McCarter, the longtime head of Channel 11, whom he recruited. (Window to the World Communication, the parent of WTTW, was a partner in the creation of the Chicago News Cooperative.)
For sure, the news and entertainment media landscape is quite different now. In 1961, there were two and a half commercial networks — ABC was seen in just half the country — and scant public television and radio. There was no cable TV to speak of, no satellite TV and no Internet. TV quiz-show, radio-payola and internal F.C.C. scandals had polluted the industry.
But, then as now, news is the most important public service, Mr. Minow says, and television falls woefully short. “Too much deals with covering controversy, crimes, fires, and not enough with the country’s great issues,” he said. Our presidential campaigns are obsessed with the trivial, he argues, despite his effort to upgrade them as longtime co-chairman of the federal Commission on Presidential Debates.
The anniversary of his speech has brought a smattering of attention, including his own article in The Atlantic and a CBS “Sunday Morning” profile next week. But some interesting things are being missed about Mr. Minow, now a vigorous 85 and a board member of The Chicago News Cooperative.
An unknowing Silicon Valley might erect a monument to him. While at the F.C.C., he helped push Congress to mandate that new television sets have UHF tuners. Most existing ones did not, meaning the majority of viewers couldn’t watch channels between 18 and 83. That inspired a boom in silicon chips and a drop in their price.
He also signed the charter for a public television station in Washington, and it became a programming pacesetter. While Chicago had had a noncommercial station, WTTW, since 1955, most big cities did not. “I was astonished that no such station existed in New York, Los Angeles or Washington,” he said.
Mr. Obama has reason to be grateful to Mr. Minow. But so do Elmo and the “Sesame Street” gang, not to mention Intel shareholders. Those are the makings of a good epitaph, too.
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