The upcoming 50th anniversary of Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) Chairman Newton Minow’s “vast
wasteland” speech has prompted some in the media to revisit the
speech to assess its relevance — or lack thereof — to today’s
media landscape.
Minow would go on to dubious fame as the namesake of the
shipwrecked boat in the 1960s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island.”
Unfortunately, Gilligan didn’t have the last word. Pity.
In Minow’s speech, delivered before the National Association of
Broadcasters, on May 9, 1961, he urged his audience:
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. Keep your
eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure
you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about
totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence,
sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes,
gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials
— many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all,
boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they
will be very, very few.
Minow’s elitist dismissal of popular entertainment aside, one
would think that the former FCC chairman would welcome the
increased choices brought about by new technology in recent years.
But you would be wrong.
In an article in this month’s
The Atlantic observing the anniversary of his speech,
Minow pays lip service to technological progress, but goes on to
set out six public policy goals that “we” — that is, government —
should pursue to supposedly improve the state of broadcasting.
“Our first must be to expand freedom, in order to strengthen
editorial independence in news and information,” says Minow,
without defining what such “freedom” would entail — specifically
freedom from whose authority. Unfortunately, he doesn’t
seem to mean freedom from an overreaching government. In the same
paragraph, Minow goes on to proclaim, “[H]appily, the FCC, under
its talented chairman, Julius Genachowski, is leading
public-interest advocates and industry groups to both meet the
practical needs and uphold the democratic values at
stake.”
Second, Minow calls on the Commission “to use new communications
technologies to improve and extend the benefits of education at all
levels” by auctioning off unused spectrum “and use the money to
invest in education” — without explaining what that “investment”
would look like. Yet involving an arguably obsolete
telecommunications bureaucracy in education policy would seem like
a good recipe for agency mission creep and future agency turf
wars.
Third, he proposes “to use new technologies to improve and
extend the reach of our health-care system.” That may be a worthy
goal, but, as with education, extending the FCC’s authority to
health care would be an unprecedented expansion of the agency’s
power.
Fourth, Minow calls for improving the nation’s public safety
response infrastructure. Like improving education and health care,
this is a worthwhile goal. However, unlike education and health
care, public safety is an area in which government’s proper role is
not very controversial, so this proposal isn’t particularly
problematic.
Fifth, he advocates “greater support to public radio and public
television.” Did Minow miss the recent debate over federal funding
of National Public Radio (NPR), which brought public attention to
the fact that the
vast majority of NPR’s funding comes from private
sources? Rather than demonstrate a need for greater
government funding, this speaks well of NPR’s ability to raise its
own funds from private donors. Minow also overlooks the problem of
government-funded media crowding out private-sector alternatives,
while forcing people to subsidize content they don’t care to
consume.
Sixth, and most perniciously, Minow proposes requiring
broadcasters to provide free airtime to political candidates. He
complains:
It is simply unconscionable that candidates for public office
have to buy access to the airwaves-something the public itself
owns-to talk to the public, unlike in most other major democratic
countries.
Wait, didn’t he advocate auctioning off some of those airwaves a
couple of proposals ago? So much for consistency. Indeed, as Minow
himself unwittingly acknowledges in his auction proposal, there is
no reason why the spectrum, or any given portion of it,
must be either owned or heavily regulated by
government.
Worse, requiring broadcasters to carry communications by
candidates amounts to forced speech, plain and
simple. Who would determine which are “legitimate” candidates for
which that airtime should be free, anyway? And one major
reason that our political system functions unlike those of “most
other major democratic countries” is that other countries don’t
have a First Amendment.
Today, Minow’s revisiting of his famous speech is just as
elitist and statist as his original screed. Yet while his views
don’t seem to have changed, the world of telecommunications he and
his successors have tried to control (thankfully, not always
successfully) has moved forward in leaps and bounds, and continues
to do so.
In Advertising
Age, Tim Brooks offers a much more optimistic — and
realistic — view of today’s broadcasting landscape.
The first decade of the 2000s has been dubbed “The Reality Era,”
but it was really an era of choice. If you want serious drama,
there’s “Mad Men,” “Six Feet Under” or “The Wire”; if it’s
intelligent comedy try “The Daily Show”or “Curb Your Enthusiasm”;
if it’s tightly plotted thrillers, how about “True Blood” or
“Damages?” If you prefer to not be sure what you’re watching, try
“Carnivale.” And, of course, “reality” shows of every stripe filled
the screen — some being high-quality efforts such as “The Amazing
Race” and “American Idol” and others that were just — well — odd.
Whole networks are now devoted to the genre. If Newton Minow
couldn’t find something to like in this plethora of choice,
tailored to so many tastes — highbrow and low-brow — perhaps he’d
need to rethink his definition of a “wasteland.” It’s been a
storm-tossed journey, but we’ve come a long way from “Gilligan’s
Island.”
We’ve come a long way indeed, but Newton Minow and his
successors seem to remain stuck in the 1960s.
In a way, Minow’s “wasteland” metaphor was unintentionally apt.
Deserts that seem arid at first sight are often full of life. And
so was “Gilligan’s Island.”
