Newton Minow, the US Federal Communications Commission chairman who criticized television as a “vast wasteland’ in a 1961 speech that sparked a national debate on the quality of TV programming, has died. He was 97.
(Bloomberg) — Newton Minow, the US Federal Communications Commission chairman who criticized television as a “vast wasteland’ in a 1961 speech that sparked a national debate on the quality of TV programming, has died. He was 97.
He died on May 6 at his home in Chicago, where for many years he had practiced law and taught.
Though Minow spent just two years at the helm of the FCC, he coined a much-quoted phrase and established himself as a leading critic of TV beginning with his first official speech.
The May 9, 1961, address to the National Association of Broadcasters came as the television industry was recovering from the quiz show scandals of the 1950s and as the FCC was completing a three-year inquiry into the practices of the three networks.
Minow, who had been appointed by President John F. Kennedy, urged broadcasters to watch their stations for a full day without regard to revenue or ratings.
“I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland,” he said. “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.”
Network Pushback
The fallout was immediate. Robert W. Sarnoff, chairman of NBC, and Frank Stanton, president of CBS, accused Minow of infringing on freedom of speech.
Minow brushed off the criticism, saying he wanted only to hold stations to the promises they made when obtaining their FCC licenses. He warned that stations with too much crime and violence, and not enough public affairs programming, risked not having their licenses renewed by the FCC.
“I was particularly concerned about children,” Minow told PBS NewsHour in a 2021 interview. “Children were spending more time with television than they were in school. And they were learning, too often, that the solution to a problem was a smack in the head or shot with a gun.”
Minow left the FCC in 1963, but he had planted a seed. The Carnegie Corporation of New York created and funded a commission to study educational television. Its report, Public Television: A Program for Action, spurred Congress to pass the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. That established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which for decades has been the steward of federal government support for public radio and television.
‘Toxic’ Content
In the decades that followed his FCC tenure, he remained a vocal critic.
In his 1995 book, Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television and the First Amendment, he urged federal lawmakers to require better educational programming for youngsters and limits on their access to violent programming. In a 2001 column for USA Today, he wrote that explosion of channel offerings made possible by cable television had added choice for consumers but hadn’t solved the problem.
“Despite many fine programs,” he wrote, “these days television often looks less like a vast wasteland than a toxic waste dump.”
Newton Norman Minow was born on Jan. 17, 1926, in Milwaukee, to Jay Minow and the former Doris Stein. He served in the US Army from 1944 to 1946 as part of a signal service battalion based in India. He then attended Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1949 and a law degree the following year.
Minow was a US Supreme Court law clerk to Chief Justice Fred Vinson, assistant counsel to Democratic Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson and partner in Stevenson’s Chicago law firm, Stevenson, Rifkind & Wirtz.
Key Moment
While working for Stevenson’s second unsuccessful presidential bid against Republican Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, Minow took a walk that would change his life.
He was sharing a room with Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s brother, on the campaign trail. During a stop in Springfield, Illinois, Minow and Robert Kennedy decided to skip Stevenson’s stump speech and visit Abraham Lincoln’s house. During the walk they had a long chat about the growing importance of television.
“Bob knew how deeply interested I was in television, and he introduced me to his brother,” Minow told NPR. “And when his brother was elected, I was asked to become chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.”
Minow was a few days shy of 35 when he was appointed. At his Senate confirmation hearing, he said he would urge broadcasters to air more public-affairs programming and fewer Westerns and crime shows.
‘Withering Critique’
His “vast wasteland” critique was “certainly the most withering, complete and searching ever to emanate from a head of a regulatory agency,” TV critic Jack Gould wrote in the New York Times. When Gould died in 1993, Minow wrote a letter to the Times saying that Gould’s role as “the conscience of television” had inspired him to accept the FCC post.
At a news conference in February 1962, Kennedy said he supported Minow’s efforts “to use, not force, but to use encouragement in persuading the networks to put better children’s programs, more public service programs” on the air. Minow’s efforts won him a Peabody Award in 1961.
Hollywood producer Sherwood Schwartz found his own way to strike back at the FCC chairman’s disparaging comments about TV shows. On Gilligan’s Island, Schwartz’s hit show that ran from 1964 to 1967 and for years afterward in syndication, the shipwrecked boat is named “S.S. Minnow.”
After FCC
After leaving the FCC in May 1963, Minow became a top executive at Encyclopaedia Britannica. Two years later, he joined the Chicago law firm Leibman, Williams, Bennett, Baird & Minow, which in 1972 merged with Sidley & Austin. He retired as a managing partner from the firm in 1991 and became senior counsel.
He was a professor of communications law and policy at Northwestern and former chairman of the Carnegie Foundation, the Public Broadcasting Service and Rand Corp. He was co-chairman the 1976 and 1980 presidential debates and vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates.
With his wife, the former Josephine Baskin, Minow had three daughters: Nell Minow, an expert on corporate governance who is vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors; Martha Minow, a Harvard Law School professor and former dean; and Mary Minow, an expert in library law.
He told NPR in 2006 that his family had decided on the appropriate epitaph for his tombstone: “On to a vaster wasteland.”
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