A vast ye wasteland: reflections on America's most famous exercise in "public interest" piracy.

• Author: Corn-Revere, Robert
• Position: 1961 speech by Newton Minow

You have to admire Newton Minow. You really do. On May 9, 1961, JFK's youthful FCC Chairman strode confidently to the podium at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention and delivered a stinging rebuke of his hosts' business. Right there, in the very Belly of the Beast, Minow branded television with a label that still resonates after the passage of four decades: TV, he said, is a "vast wasteland" 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." (1)

The move was bold, the speech pithy, and in every important respect, wrong. The television marketplace at the time was neither vast nor as much of a wasteland as the Chairman claimed. More importantly, the speech itself was an exercise in public interest piracy--a naked effort to coerce broadcasters indirectly into doing what the government could not compel directly. It is the kind of speech that puts the bully in the bully pulpit.

The message itself was pretty unremarkable if you don't think about who delivered it, and where. After all, you don't have to be too smart to know that TV can be dumb. As the popular euphemisms of the time made clear--like "idiot box" and "boob tube"--the ideas in the speech were not exactly original. Noted personages of the day also had made the same point: Frank Lloyd Wright called TV "chewing gum for the eyes"; (2) Ernie Kovacs said that television is called a medium "because it is neither rare nor well done"; (3) and David Frost said that television is an invention "that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home." (4)

But the message carries far more weight when delivered not by an architect, a comic, or a journalist, but by the Chairman of the agency that grants, and, more to the point, denies broadcast licenses. The expression itself--"vast wasteland"--is positively Churchillian. Like "Iron Curtain" it is rich with imagery and can fit on a bumper sticker. And it is absolutely breathtaking to combine this memorable turn of phrase with the masterful stroke of delivering such an unwelcome message at the annual celebration of commercial broadcasting.

The "Vast Wasteland" speech, as it has come to be known, is nothing less than the regulator's manifesto. For those who think the government should have a greater role in controlling what we see on TV and hear on the radio, the speech was the background theme for the journey to Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC. (5) Of course, Minow disclaimed any intent to engage in censorship: "I am in Washington to help broadcasting, not to harm it; to strengthen it, not to weaken it; to reward it, not punish it; to encourage it, not threaten it; to stimulate it, not censor it." (6) In this respect, perhaps the speech should be considered Shakespearian ("I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him."). (7)

But this was hardly a subtle exercise of regulation by raised eyebrow, either. The Chairman told the broadcasters that their obligation to serve the public trust was imposed by law, and that they should not expect automatic renewal of their licenses if their programming failed to improve. "I say to you now: renewal will not be pro forma in the future. There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license." (8) He also scoffed at those who asked the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC" or "Commission") to establish clear standards to qualify for license renewal. "My answer is: Why should you want to know how close you can come to the edge of the cliff?" (9)

In this regard, Minow was not suggesting that he wanted to impose his personal programming preferences on broadcasters. Heavens, no. That would be censorship, which, he said, "strikes at the tap root of our free society." (10) Rather, the Chairman said he wanted to hold public hearings on license renewals to determine "whether the community which each broadcaster serves believes he has been serving the public interest." (11) In such hearings, Minow said he wanted "the people who own the air and the homes that television enters to tell you and the FCC what's been going on"; that it would be up to the people "to make notes, document cases, tell us the facts." (12)

What could be more democratic than that? Well, people's actual viewing preferences, for one thing. However, what interests the public has never been of much interest to "public interest" regulators. As the Chairman told the assembled broadcasters, "[y]ou will get no argument from me if you say that, given a choice between a Western and a symphony, more people will watch the Western." "But," he added, "your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast." Accordingly, he warned, "[i]t is not enough to cater to the nation's whims--you must also serve the nation's needs."

This is the enduring dilemma that confronts the "public interest" regulator. In order to avoid the well-founded charge that governmental mandates about programming quality would violate basic First Amendment principles, he must claim that he is not imposing his own tastes, but is merely regulating on behalf of "the people." The problem with this argument is that the facts refuse to cooperate. In reality, people's choices are so, well, disappointing to the refined mind of the regulator. As theatre critic Clive Barnes put it, "[t]elevision is the first truly democratic culture--the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what the people want." (14) Writer Paddy Chayefsky was even more blunt: "Television is democracy at its ugliest." (15) Accordingly, the theory goes, it is the regulator's...