Revisiting the vast wasteland.

• Author: Cate, Fred H.
• Position: Interview

On May 9, 1961, Newton N. Minow gave his first public address as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC" or "Commission"). (1) Little was known at that time about the new Chairman, other than that he was the youngest person ever to hold the job and that he was not part of the Washington establishment.

It was widely suspected that President John F. Kennedy had chosen the young Chicago lawyer to help clean house at the Commission and in the broadcast industry, both of which were still reeling from the payola and quiz show scandals of the 1950s. It might therefore be expected that the chosen audience for his maiden speech--the National Association of Broadcasters ("NAB")--was somewhat wary about what they might hear. Nothing, however, could have prepared them for what Minow had to say.

The industry scandals of the past he dismissed with a single sentence. "I have confidence in your health," Minow said, turning to the reason he had come to the NAB annual convention that day, "[b]ut not in your product."

"Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America.... When television is good, nothing--not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers--nothing is better.

"But when television is bad," Minow continued, "nothing is worse."

With the industry leadership squarely in his sights, Minow challenged his audience: "I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you--and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off."

"You will see 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." Minow continued: "And, endlessly, commercials--many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom."

"I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland."

The speech struck a nerve in American society. Although the industry was shocked and outraged, the public's response was, in the words of communications scholar Mary Ann Watson, "quick, abundant, and overwhelmingly positive." (2) Thousands of letters flooded into the Chairman's office, and overnight, Minow became a celebrity. "By the end of his first year on the job," Watson writes, "Minow made more radio and TV appearances than any other member of the Kennedy administration, except the President himself." (3) Minow was named "top newsmaker" in a 1961 Associated Press poll.

With that one speech, Minow altered the American vocabulary forever. His NAB address is among the most quoted of all twentieth-century speeches, and has been reprinted again and again in newspapers and anthologies. The phrase "vast wasteland" has become an icon of American culture, memorialized in hundreds of editorial cartoons, listed in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, quoted in popular fiction, and featured as the answer to questions in Jeopardy!, Trivial Pursuit, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. "When I die," Minow is fond of saying, "my wife and three daughters will inscribe on my tombstone--'On to a vaster wasteland.'"

With these words Minow also launched a national debate that still continues today about the quality of video programming and the extent to which it meets the needs of the public. The debate consumed the public, as well as industry executives, government officials, and communications scholars.

Minow's famous (some would say infamous) words also marked the beginning of more than forty years--and still counting--of challenging broadcasters and other industry and government officials to improve television programming. Minow had come to the Commission at the age of thirty-five from private law practice in Chicago. After serving as a U.S. Army sergeant in the China/Burma/India Theater in World War II, he had graduated first in his class from Northwestern University Law School, clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, and served as assistant counsel to Illinois Governor Adlai E. Stevenson, before beginning his law practice.

When he was appointed to the FCC, Minow had promised: "I'm here to do what I think needs to be done.... I'm not interested in being reappointed, and I don't want a job in the industry." After two years as Chairman, Minow kept that promise. When he left the Commission, Minow took a position he had been offered before going to the FCC, as Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 1965, Minow joined Leibman, Williams, Bennett, Baird & Minow, which in 1972 merged with Sidley & Austin; in 2001 the firm became Sidley Austin Brown & Wood. In 1991, Minow retired as a managing partner to become senior counsel to the firm.

In all of his undertakings, Minow has dared broadcasters to achieve a higher vision. "Is there one person in this room," Minow asked in 1961, "who claims that broadcasting can't do better? ... Gentlemen, your trust accounting with your beneficiaries is overdue." In the four decades since, he has not merely been a thorn in the side of an industry that he believes has failed to live up to its potential and its public service obligation but he has also been a vocal critic of complacent government officials. In the forty years since his retirement as Chairman of the FCC, Minow has worked energetically to help television live up to its promise for the public.

He has chaired the boards of Chicago Educational Television Association, the Public Broadcasting Service, and the CBS Foundation, as well as of the Rand Corp., the Carnegie Corp. of New York, and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He co-chaired the 1976 and 1980 presidential debates sponsored by the League of Women Voters, and directed the Bi-Partisan Advisory Commission for the 1988 and 1992 presidential debates, before becoming director of the successor Commission on Presidential Debates, which sponsored the 1996 and 2000 debates. He has served on numerous presidential commissions. Most recently, in February 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed Minow to chair the external advisory board charged with overseeing the Department of Defense's Total Information Awareness Project.

In his 1995 book, Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment, Minow and co-author Craig LaMay proposed federal legislation to enhance educational programming for children and help parents control their children's access to violent programming. He has chaired two Twentieth Century Fund studies, one on "Campaign Costs in the Electronic Era" and another, with Lawrence Grossman, on "Fulfilling the Promise of the Digital and Internet Age."

In 1991, Minow marked the thirtieth anniversary of his 1961 NAB speech with an address at the Gannett Foundation Media Center at Columbia University--How Vast the Wasteland Now? (4) In that speech he quoted the words of E.B. White, who after seeing experimental television demonstrated in 1938, wrote: "I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance to the general peace, or a saving radiance in the sky."

"That radiance," Minow concluded in 1991, "falls unevenly today. It is still a dim light in education. It has not fulfilled its potential for children. It has neglected the needs of public television. And in the electoral process it has cast a dark shadow."

Minow's efforts have not gone unnoticed, either in Washington or across the country. He has been honored with twelve honorary doctorates, and numerous civic and professional awards, including the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award, (5) the Federal Communications Bar Association's Lifetime Achievement Award, (6) and a George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award (7) in 1961--the only Peabody ever won by an FCC commissioner--for having "rescue[d] the wasteland from the cowboys and private eyes. He has reminded broadcasters of their responsibilities and put new heart in the viewers." (8)

He has served as a trustee of the Mayo Foundation, Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame (where he was the first Jewish trustee), and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, among others. He has also served as a director on many corporate boards, including those of CBS, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Field Communications, Aon, Sara Lee Corp., and the Tribune Co., as well as a Visiting Fellow of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Annenberg Professor of Communications Law and Policy at Northwestern University, Director of Northwestern's Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of his service as FCC Chairman, the Federal Communications Law Journal invited Newton Minow to share his thoughts on his famous speech, his remarkable career, and his view of broadcasting and the greatly expanded market for video programming today. On October 17, 2002, we sat down in Minow's Chicago office for a wide-ranging, no-holds-barred conversation. Surrounded by walls covered floor-to-ceiling with awards, honorary degrees, legislation, cartoons, family portraits, and signed photographs of Minow with a half-century of political leaders and other luminaries--from President Kennedy to Pope Paul VI--we revisited the "vast wasteland" of 1961 and assessed the programming landscape of today.

THE NAB SPEECH

FHC: Let's start forty-one years ago with the speech to the NAB. I reread the 1961 speech and it is a remarkably courageous speech. Did you know how courageous it was going to be? What prompted you to give such a bold speech?

NNM: The context of the time is...