Newton Minow, 97; led FCC, advocated for satellite communications
Newton N. Minow, who as President John F. Kennedy’s new Federal Communications Commission chair in 1961 sent shock waves through an industry and touched a nerve in a nation addicted to banality and mayhem by calling American television “a vast wasteland,” died Saturday at his home in Chicago. He was 97.
His daughter Nell Minow said the cause was a heart attack.
On May 9, 1961, almost four months after Kennedy called upon Americans to renew their commitment to freedom around the globe, Mr. Minow, a bespectacled bureaucrat who had recently been put in charge of the FCC, got up before 2,000 broadcast executives at a luncheon in Washington and invited them to watch television for a day.
“Stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profitand-loss sheet, or rating book to distract you, and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off,” Mr. Minow said. “I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”
The audience sat aghast as he went on: “You will see 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. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom.”
He added, “If you think I exaggerate, try it.”
Mr. Minow’s characterization of TV as “a vast wasteland” — a phrase inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” — was an instant sensation, entering the American lexicon and setting off an avalanche of headlines, editorials, cartoons and letters to the editor, and a national debate over the viewing habits of adults and children.
It also transformed Mr. Minow, a 35-year-old Chicago lawyer who had campaigned for Adlai E. Stevenson and Kennedy, into an overnight celebrity — a household name that a poll of editors by the Associated Press found to be the “top newsmaker” of 1961, ahead of Jack Paar, Gary Cooper, and Elizabeth Taylor.
Mr. Minow served with the FCC for only about two years. And in retrospect, experts say, his most important contributions probably had less to do with his famous speech than with his efforts on behalf of two laws adopted during the Kennedy administration.
One required TV sets sold in America to be equipped to receive ultra-high-frequency, or UHF, signals as well as the veryhigh-frequency, or VHF, broadcasts that predominated at the time. By the end of the 1960s, most Americans had reception on scores of channels, not just a dozen, with a wide diversity of programming, especially on independent and public stations.
Mr. Minow also pushed legislation that opened the era of satellite communications. It fostered the creation, by a consortium of interests, of the Communications Satellite Corp., or Comsat, and, later, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, or Intelsat, which allowed the United States to dominate satellite communications in the 1960s and ’70s, and it ultimately led to greater program diversity.
In an interview for this obituary in July 2019, Mr. Minow bemoaned the likelihood that he would be remembered for his assessment of America’s television culture rather than for his efforts on behalf of communications satellites, which he said led to the global information revolution, to digital communications and to the internet.
“I went to the White House and told President Kennedy that these communications satellites were more important than sending men into space, because they would send ideas into space and ideas last longer than people,” he said. “I testified 13 times in Congress for the legislation to create the corporations and the funding. I think this is more important than anything else I’ve ever done, for its impact on the future of the world.”
The legislation was adopted, and America’s first communications satellite went into orbit in 1962 and was soon used to transmit programs across the world. Mr. Minow’s role was detailed in “Chasing the Moon,” a 2019 book, by Alan Andres and Robert Stone, and a companion PBS-TV series marking the 50th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing in 1969.
Mr. Minow resigned from the FCC in 1963 to become an executive with Encyclopaedia Britannica. Two years later, he joined a Chicago law firm that in 1972 merged with Sidley Austin, one of the world’s largest practices. Mr. Minow was a partner until 1991 and then became senior counsel. In 1988, he recruited Barack Obama to work as a summer associate at the firm, where Obama met his future wife, Michelle Robinson.
In the decades that followed his FCC tenure, Mr. Minow wrote books and articles, lectured widely, and continued to campaign for programming reforms. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service were founded, educational programming for children and adults was greatly expanded, and network news grew from adolescence to maturity, with a new emphasis on documentaries.
Mr. Minow also played important roles in the development of the nation’s televised presidential debates, which began in 1960 with a confrontation between Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Mr. Minow and Stevenson, a former Illinois governor and presidential candidate, helped persuade Congress that year to exempt presidential debates from the FCC’s equal-time rule, so that broadcasters could cover them without having to include marginal candidates.
Without congressional exemptions, there were no debates in 1964, 1968, and 1972. But the FCC later changed its rules to provide exemptions, and Mr. Minow helped the League of Women Voters revive the debates.
He was co-chair of the 1976 and 1980 debates and later served on the board of the Commission on Presidential Debates, a bipartisan nonprofit group that has organized them since 1988. With Craig L. LaMay, he wrote “Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future” (2008).
Newton Norman Minow was born in Milwaukee on Jan. 17, 1926, the son of Jay A. Minow, who owned a chain of laundries, and Doris (Stein) Minow. He attended public schools in Milwaukee, enlisted in the Army in World War II, and, after earning a certificate in engineering at the University of Michigan as part of an Army training program, helped lay the first telephone line connecting India and China. He mustered out in 1946.
In 1949, he married Josephine Baskin. The couple had three daughters.
Besides his daughter Nell, Mr. Minow is survived by his other daughters, Martha and Mary Minow, and three grandchildren. His wife died last year.
Mr. Minow graduated from Northwestern University in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in speech and political science, and a year later, he received a law degree at Northwestern, where he was editor of the law review and first in his class academically.
Although his campaign against television violence and mediocrity was widely applauded, it was also criticized by powerful television executives as an unconstitutional government attempt to interfere with private enterprise and by others as an elitist attack on entertainment enjoyed by millions of viewers. The sitcom “Gilligan’s Island” (1964-67) offered a rebuke of sorts: The boat that sank, leaving its passengers stranded, was named the S.S. Minnow.
In 2011, Mr. Minow wrote an article for The Atlantic, “A Vaster Wasteland,” in which he hailed the “sizzling and explosive advances in technology” that had transformed communications. But he berated television again for failing America’s children and politics, sounding every inch the warhorse of old.
“For 50 years, we have bombarded our children with commercials disguised as programs and with endless displays of violence and sexual exploitation,” he said. “We are nearly alone in the democratic world in not providing our candidates with public-service television time. Instead, we make them buy it — and so money consumes and corrupts our political discourse.”