Fifty years ago this week, Newton N. Minow delivered one of the most electrifying speeches ever given by a bureaucrat of the U.S. government.
Minow, a Chicago lawyer and backer of John F. Kennedy, was the new president’s appointee to head the Federal Communications Commission.
At his coming-out address — May 9, 1961, at the National Association of Broadcasters’ annual convention — he lectured TV executives about using the airwaves to print money without giving back anything of value to the public.
Everyone remembers the two words that entered the cultural lexicon afterward: “vast wasteland.” But few remember why Minow’s sermonette caused such a sensation at the time. Even fewer can recall the sweeping promises the FCC chairman made in that speech or that he failed to deliver on any of them.
“Yours is a most honorable profession,” he began. “Anyone in the broadcasting business has a tough row to hoe.”
The compliments ended there. The TV industry raked in huge profits in 1960, Minow noted, “despite a recession throughout the country.” That profit, he added, was achieved with public property. After all, we the people license the airwaves to broadcasters to serve “the public interest, convenience and necessity,” as stated in the 1934 Telecommunications Act that created the FCC.
“I invite each of you to sit down in front of your 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,” he said. “I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”
A call for accountability
Minow then surveyed that “vast wasteland”: the violent Westerns, the aggressive commercials, the mindless soaps, game shows and kids TV. . . on and on as his hearers shifted in their seats.
Then Minow informed the broadcasters that Kennedy and Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev weren’t the only ones holding nuclear options. “I did not come to Washington to idly observe the squandering of the public’s airwaves,” he declared. “When your license comes up for renewal, your performance is compared with your promises.”
As a rhetorical throwing-down-of-the-gauntlet, the “vast wasteland” speech was a success. Minow had used his federal power to crystallize a decade of elitist critiques of TV. It wasn’t just the medium’s relentless salesmanship or hypnotic hold over children.
To many, TV’s worst offense was shifting the nation’s cultural center from the middlebrow realm of Broadway and Hollywood toward the lowbrow end of Hopalong Cassidy and the sports pages.
As a plan of action, though, the speech was a failure. Minow bears most of the responsibility for that.
First, he promised personally what his agency could not deliver.
Minow warned of dire consequences for broadcasters if they did not do as he commanded. But the FCC had never pulled a license since the growth of commercial TV in 1947. Minow might have wanted to change all that, but he was just one of seven commissioners, most of whom were probably unprepared to join his crusade.
More crucially, he hadn’t defined how the agency might carry out such a crusade.
“I intend to find out whether the community which each broadcaster serves believes he has been serving the public interest,” he said that day.
And the ratings are born
But making good on that vow would require a level of public oversight the FCC had never attempted — and wouldn’t under Minow.
Meanwhile, as media scholar Craig Allen has documented, TV stations launched a rapid response to the chairman’s speech. As they frantically scanned his remarks, looking for something he liked, they saw that Minow liked local news. And how would you know if your station’s news was serving the public? Ratings!
Like any good snob, Minow hated audience measurement — “Ratings ought to be the slave of the broadcaster, not his master,” he sniffed — but soon it became clear he had no alternative method for gauging public interest. Logically, station managers concluded that they would be judged by the ratings their newscasts got.
Management at stations with last- place newscasts grew nervous. A few brought in consumer research firms, the kind that helped GM sell cars and Sears sell appliances. They were going to help these stations sell the news.
The consultants worked wonders. Last-place stations zoomed into first. Other stations were now in last place, and they hired news doctors.
So, if you have ever gritted your teeth about the vast wasteland of local TV news, you can thank the author of the “vast wasteland” speech.
