Forty years of wandering in the wasteland.

• Author: Johnson, Nicholas
• Position: Television

For the first time in human history we have available to us the ability ... to furnish entertainment, instruction, widening vision of national problems and national events. An obligation rests on us to see that it is devoted to real service and to develop the material ... that is really worthwhile.

--Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, 1924 (1)

The Federal Communications Law Journal ("FCLJ") editors have asked us to reflect upon the changes in broadcasting's content since that fateful day, forty-two years ago, when Federal Communications Commission ("FCC") Chairman Newton Minow challenged station owners to watch twenty-four hours of their own programming. (2)

Over the protests of a staff aide, who insisted the chairman remove the offensive "vast wasteland" phrase from his speech text, Minow persisted, ignored the advice, and is forever remembered for his two-word characterization of television programming in 1961.

Forty years later, the phrase is still with us. (3) Indeed, like other famous phrases, it has given rise to variations: "Television creates a vast waistline"; "Today television is only a half-vast wasteland." But the editors are rightly asking us for more serious reflection.

The phrase aside, what can be said about the role of television in the early twenty-first century compared with forty years ago? A candid appraisal would have to conclude that it is a mixed bag. Some of the complaints about broadcasting in the 1960s are still applicable; if anything, conditions are worse. Other half-century-old complaints are irrelevant in today's media environment.

In some instances ineffective efforts at government regulation have been replaced with even more inadequate efforts at marketplace non-regulation. Today's consumers suffer at the hands of largely unregulated oligopolies.

No brief article (or entire FCLJ issue) would be long enough to cover the subject thoroughly even if the author were sufficiently informed and wise to know everything that needs to be said. But here are some observations about the changes that have occurred and what still must be done.

SHIFTING SANDS IN THE VAST WASTELAND

The "broadcasting" of the 1960s--as a delivery technology, commercial industry structure, and programming source--has either disappeared or assumed a far less prominent role. True, there are still transmitters and antennas sending TV signals through the air, but most Americans who "watch television" today have programming delivered to their homes through a coaxial cable or satellite dish, rather than a rooftop antenna. Viewers have choices of 50 to 100, or more channels--rather than the three networks once characterized as a "two-and-one-half network economy." (4) Much of the programming is of a kind, and from sources, that did not exist forty-two years ago, are not FCC licensees, and that distribute their programming to cable systems via satellites.

The "wasteland" critics of the 1960s have far less to complain about today in terms of number of formats, and the quantity of news, public affairs, and cultural programming. FCC Chairman Minow's efforts at increasing consumer choice were, of necessity, primarily limited to the commendable promotion of UHF stations and educational television. Put aside for the moment the issue of program quality. Clearly there are far more choices than forty-two years ago. PBS, Bravo, A&E Television, and numerous movie channels offer a range of choice of drama well beyond the episodic series of old--including a rerun of more feature films every week than Hollywood used to produce in a year. Sports is everywhere, including multiple ESPN channels. Specialty channels, from Animal Planet to the Travel Channel, further splinter while serving the audience. C-SPAN, CNN, FOX, MSNBC and CNBC--even a twenty-four-hour weather channel--offer considerably more than the fifteen minutes of evening news originally made available by the networks.

Nor are cable and satellites the only source of things to watch on TV screens. Broadcast television programming must compete for viewers' time against videotapes and DVDs. Relatively cheap (for what one gets) digital video cameras and computer video editing programs enable video buffs to make their own. There are numerous video games that can be viewed on a TV. The TV screen can even be used for surfing the Internet.

Ruminations about the implications of the Internet fill books. For now it is enough to note that: (1) time spent watching a computer screen is time not spent watching TV; (2) many of the functions of cable television, such as news, can be delivered as well or better through the Internet; (3) many TV programs (and commercials) offer a blended Internet-television service--television is a gateway to their far more detailed offerings at an Internet address prominently displayed in the TV picture; and (4) apparently a significant proportion of the audience is simultaneously watching both television and Internet-connected computer screens.

Nor is the buzzword "convergence" limited to the fact one can now watch miniature videos from a broadcaster's Web site on a computer screen or surf the Internet on a TV screen. There is coming to be less and less distinction between the handheld devices variously called cell phones, pagers, digital cameras, and Personal Data Assistants ("PDA"). (5) TV screens may be as small as a wristwatch, or as large as a living room wall. The time shifting made possible by the VCR ultimately becomes a life-shifting option for families. The programs can be recorded not only on a VCR, but a computer, or a special purpose device, such as TiVo (utilizing a form of computer hard drive that may also enable viewers more easily to skip commercials).

The adverse impacts on the 1960s "broadcasters" from this competition for viewers' time have been various and dramatic. For starters, the original networks' share of sets in use is roughly half what it was then--and this for an industry that is in the business of selling the audience, as a product, to advertisers. More competitors, such as FOX, are contributing to bidding up the prices for sports and other programming. And just as newspapers had to adjust their daily product to the more rapid presentation of news, first from radio, and then from television, so yesterday's broadcasters have had to adjust their "evening news" to today's competition from cable's twenty-four-hour/seven-day-a-week news channels.

A viewer with cable reception, and a remote control device, possesses the great equalizer. Local cable access channels, low-power TV, and UHF stations (formerly beyond reception, or with clearly inferior picture quality) are now just as clear as, and only one click away from, the network affiliates--which have, thereby, lost an additional former competitive advantage.

The remote makes possible viewer choice, and program competition, with a vengeance--"entertain me now or I am gone"--in the viewer's desperate chase, constantly sampling the entirety of cable's offerings. The fear is that there may some day, on some channel, be something worth watching that the viewer will otherwise miss.

The remote, and gender differences in its use, is the subject of jokes. But its impact is no joke for those in the business who long for the vast wasteland days of a flow-through audience dutifully watching commercials. Then a viewer could be counted on to stay in his or her chair, fixed on the same station, throughout the evening. The remote means the advertiser's formerly captive audience is free to flee. Those commercials--so expensive to produce and place--may not be watched at all.

The wasteland's shifting sands make today's media landscape scarcely recognizable to a sleepy Rip Van Winkle who dozed off in front of his TV set forty-two years ago. Some things, however, have remained the same.

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