On the anniversary of former FCC commissioner Newton Minow’s speech decrying television as a “vast wasteland,” Chicago News Cooperative columnist James Warren makes an important point: Minow’s speech was really about how broadcasters should be forced to do more public affairs programming in return for their free use of the public airwaves:
Sitting high above the Loop with Newton Minow, I realized that history buried his lede–to his everlasting good fortune.
“Burying the lede” is newspaperese for sticking a story’s main point too far down. It partly explains why Monday brings the 50th anniversary of a speech that is now part of the cultural lexicon: “A vast wasteland.”
Thatâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s how he referred to television on May 9, 1961, in his first address as chairman of President John F. Kennedy‘s Federal Communications Commission. One can’t imagine regulatory chiefs or cabinet officers today speaking so harshly, and forthrightly, to an industry they oversee.
The real message that Mr. Minow, then a 35-year-old Chicago lawyer, wanted to impart was that in exchange for free and exclusive licenses to use the airwaves, bona fide “public service” programming should be provided by broadcasters, whom he addressed and angered at their national gathering in Washington. “Vast wasteland” was a parenthetical term.
Does the average American today even realize that the airwaves are public property? How would they? It’s not an truth that receives any air time.
Here is a modern, free-market perspective from inside the ad agency business: http://admajoremblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/changing-role-of-tv.html
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