The FCC head who declared TV a wasteland
Newton Minow 1926–2023
Newton Minow coined an unforgettable phrase to describe the programming on television: “vast wasteland.” In 1961, the new, young head of the Federal Communications Commission became an overnight celebrity when he addressed the national association of broadcast executives, daring them to watch their own stations for a full day. “You will see,” he said, “a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation 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.” Even after he left the role, Minow continued to push for public-interest programming. “When television is good,” he said, “nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.”
Minow was born into a middle-class Milwaukee family, said The Washington Post. After earning a law degree from Northwestern University, he clerked for a Supreme Court justice, then turned to Democratic politics. Named FCC chairman by President John F. Kennedy at age 35, he immediately “set out to revive the agency as a watchdog.” Minow’s “scorching indictment” of television, said The New York Times, along with his veiled threat to yank licenses from broadcasters, led to accusations of elitism and improper government meddling. TV writers hated him: Gilligan’s Island planted a shot at him by naming its famous sinking boat the S.S. Minnow. But his efforts paid off, in the expansion of educational programming for kids.
Minow left the FCC in 1963, said Bloomberg. He later served as director of Encyclopedia Britannica and head of the forerunner to PBS and sat on the boards of CBS and the Commission on Presidential Debates. At a Chicago law firm in 1988, he recruited a young Barack Obama as a summer associate. Minow said that although his “vast wasteland” comment stuck in the public’s memory, his more consequential achievement was pushing Kennedy to send the first communications satellite into orbit, in 1962. Winning the satellite space race would be “more important than sending men into space,” Minow said he told the president, because satellites “would send ideas into space, and ideas last longer than people.”