Vast Wasteland

It was one of the most celebrated speeches ever delivered.

Newton Minow, FCC Commissioner, was speaking to the National Association of Broadcasters Convention, May 9, 1961.

Look what you're producing, he said to them.

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air

and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper,

without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you.

Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off.

I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You're talking about the Gettysburg Address for broadcasters.

The late Mike Dann heard it. He was a programming executive at CBS at the time.

I can't tell you the importance of that speech.

The two words, vast wasteland, stuck like glue, remembers Minow.

The two words that I wanted to be remembered were not vast wasteland.

The two words I cared about were public interest.

When it came to commercial broadcasting then, the public interest was not at the forefront.

To understand the moment, you have to go back a few years to the earliest days of TV,

says Brandeis University's Thomas Dorey.

It all happened so fast.

In the late 1940s, about one in ten families in America have TV.

By the late 1950s and by the time Newton Minow gives his famous speech,

it's more like 99%.

More than one in ten families have television,

and more families would rather give up their refrigerator than their television.

Newton Minow was one of those people.

He was first in line to buy a TV.

The minute I saw it, I said this is the most important invention since the atomic bomb.

Minow had been a lawyer and had worked for Adlai Stevenson

during Stevenson's unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1956.

There, he'd met Robert F. Kennedy, and the two had discussed television and its impact on their families.

And the dismal state of things in the broadcast business.

Scandal of the year, the television quiz show fraud with Charles Van Doren, the pivotal figure.

There were the quiz scandals and payola scandals.

Scandals at the FCC, President Eisenhower was forced to ask the then chairman of the FCC to resign.

Things were really at a low point.

Distinguished broadcaster Edward R. Murrow had made a speech in the late 50s.

This instrument can teach

It can illuminate

Yes, and even it can inspire.

It was a plea for TV to realize its potential.

But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.

Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.

The new frontier is here, whether we seek it or not.

And a vision for a broader potential was expressed by a new Democratic candidate in 1960.

But I believe that the times require imagination.

And courage and perseverance.

I'm asking each of you

Kennedy believed that government had a legitimate role to play in the development of a country's cultural life.

Marianne Watson, author of The Expanding Vista, American television in the Kennedy years, says the Minow connection had stayed with Bobby Kennedy and his brother.

And John Kennedy, the first appointment he made to a regulatory agency was Newton Minow.

The Untouchable

Minow's appointment to the position coincided with another development, as TV audiences multiplied.

The series The Untouchables on ABC had become a big hit.

And that kind of formulaic violent programming was replacing a lot of the quality series.

When I show it to students today, even today's jaded students are a little bit surprised at the, you know, just sprays of machine gun.

The distance between the power television has and the responsibility television is assuming is seen to be particularly wide by the early 1960s.

Clearly at the heart of the FCC's authority lies its power to license, to renew or fail to renew, or to revoke a license.

So in that perfect storm of a moment, Minow walked out to challenge broadcasters to be better.

He said it was a vast wasteland, but he said a few other things, too.

I say to you now, renewal will not be pro forma in the future.

There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license.

The 39-minute speech was as direct as any FCC mandate had ever been.

Minow was saying, we're actually going to enforce this. There were consequences to pay, and that is something we don't have anymore.

Newton Minow was famous overnight.

The public loved him, but broadcasters called the day he spoke, that Tuesday, Black Tuesday, remembered Mike Dan.

We were making money. The basis for American enterprise, whether it's selling cars or operating a broadcasting company, was the profit motive.

There was anger among broadcasters, and fear.

Because we were concerned that Newton would be more aggressive in his speech.

More aggressive after that critical speech.

The speech was a bombshell.

We had meetings in Washington. We had meetings with ourselves.

Nothing like this had ever happened before.

What actually did happen as a result? That depends on whom you ask.

We thought it was an excellent speech, but I did absolutely nothing to improve the situation, and I know of no one who did.

Mary Ann Watson believes there was an impact.

That social dramas like The Defenders, East Side, West Side, and similar series grew out of that regulatory zeal of the very public, very popular Mr. Minow.

And of course, broadcasters had assumed there would be two terms, eight years of such pressures.

But it didn't happen that way.

The end of the era, the Newton Minow, the new frontier era in regulation, is really when President Johnson takes office.

He is a broadcaster. He identifies with broadcasters. Much of his family fortune is from radio stations.

Lady Bird owned radio stations, and so they had a lot of money in broadcast holdings.

So when he took office, his inclination was to ease off on government regulation of broadcasting.

Before that, it had looked for a moment as if things might change.

As if the free market and the public interest might be reconciled in some way.

In the end, the power of TV to resist regulation proved both vast and untouchable.

It's Fishko Files. I'm Sarah Fishko.