From Vast Wasteland to electronic garden: responsibilities in the new video environment.

• Author: Firestone, Charles M.

Newton Minow's "Vast Wasteland" speech (1) set a tone for his tenure at the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC"), and will forever be associated with Minow's very distinguished legal career. It was brave, brash, and on point. It suggested a lack of responsibility by television broadcasters to air cultural content, to balance crass entertainment with a wider variety of opinions and viewpoints, and to serve the local community as a public service in exchange for their public licenses.

Let us remember how different the period of Minow's domain was from the present. It was an era when stations such as Jackson, Mississippi's WLBT-TV segregated its programming with only white faces, (2) when networks relied on cigarette ads, (3) programmers fixed quiz shows, (4) and their radio brethren took payola to air pop records. (5) But it was also a time when news was thought of as a public service more than a profit center, when important political events, such as national political party conventions, were televised to the nation by all three networks and were watched by ninety percent of the television audience, and the World Series was played and televised during the daytime. Depending on one's vantage point, broadcasters of the 1950s were innocent, patronizing, or venal. But the point of Minow's speech was clear: There was good fare on the air, but most of what was on the screen was below the standards of those who put it there, below the spirit of public service to community, and below the potential of the medium. Minow urged the broadcasters in attendance to right their own ship, take responsibility, and cultivate the wasteland into an electronic garden.

REVOLUTIONS

Since those days, several revolutions have changed the landscape of television. We have seen the generational revolution of the 1960s, which brought with it, or followed, the civil rights movement, bringing forth advances in the rights of minorities, women, the disabled, the elderly, gays and lesbians, and a new attitude toward one's lifestyle. Perhaps as a part of this revolution, or as a revolution all its own, we have seen a sexual revolution, from the chaperon to the pill, from a public prudence to a level of acceptability for broadcasting offensive language, violence, innuendo, and skin, resulting in video fare on television that would simply have knocked the socks off the network censors of the 1950s.

Most significantly, we have seen a technological revolution, adding multi-channel delivery, digitization, interactivity, digital storage and retrieval, and with them all, greater consumer choice and more fractionalized audiences for the broadcaster. Increasingly, we have at our fingertips, literally, the best and worst the world has to offer.

It is difficult, however, to call the electronic delivery of video "television," because the form of programming, the delivery system, and the reception equipment have changed so radically. Today, almost all consumers watch video on a television screen, but as the screen becomes digital, as the delivery system also becomes digital and packet-switched over broadband, and as the programming becomes interactive, calling our screens "television" will be like "dialing" a number, or "typing" a page--a vestige in our language for a previous technology. For our purposes here, however, I will speak of television, and not allow the promise of the future to cloud the realities of the present.

THEN AND NOW

While these revolutions have been received differently depending on the eye of the viewer, one can no longer call television the "vast wasteland." Whatever failings television has today, it can provide a wide variety of quality programming to the consumer, a broad variety of viewpoints, particularly on cable (and more particularly on radio), and hours of local news that addresses at least some local needs and interests. While Minow had a few educational television stations in major cities, we now have public broadcasters in every market, and additional cultural, political, and documentary offerings on cable.

Television may no longer be a vast wasteland, but it has settled for being a "bad tasteland." Despite the technological revolutions of sight and sound, of delivery and replay, and of interactivity, the television of today is susceptible to the same complaints that Minow raised more than forty years ago. Indeed, to a certain extent, those look like the golden days, at least in terms of political coverage, serious debate, and classic drama.

Minow congratulated the networks in his speech for excellent fare and named programs he liked, ones that could be updated today to fare like 60 Minutes, The Sopranos, Hill Street Blues, Ken Burns's Civil War, and on and on. But Minow then stood back and urged broadcasters to critique the rest of the day.

What if we did that today? What would we find, and what could be done about it? In every category that Minow addressed, we are better and we are worse.

DIVERSITY

Minow's speech preceded the civil rights revolution, and his call for diversity was more in the form of viewpoints than in background. But in either case, television has much to be proud of, and much further to go, in providing diversity. I was fortunate to be a part of the public-interest movement in the 1970s that agitated for greater employment, coverage, and depiction of minorities, women, and the disabled in broadcasting. It would be a half-decade after Minow's speech until audiences even had standing to complain about a television license, (6) but from the United Church of Christ case forward for another fifteen years, audience groups, aided by precedents at the FCC and the courts, moved their local stations to recognizing the importance of carrying a diversity of voices and a diversity of people on the air.

Yet today, the number of stations owned by minorities is still miniscule, (7) broadcasters are no longer subject to detailed regulations to air controversial programming (8) or to "ascertain" the needs and interests of their audiences, (9) and licenses are routinely renewed by a postcard renewal system. There is more diversity available to the viewer than ever before, yet the potential is not nearly realized. Minorities remain on the outside, and many local issues do not see the light of a television screen.

PUBLIC SERVICE

Minow urged the broadcasters to rise to their status as public trustees by serving their local communities. Again, the amount of local news, traffic, weather, sports, and cultural reviews, taken together, is staggering, especially...