You may have heard television described as a "vast wasteland." Did you know a Chicagoan coined that phrase? What he said more than 40 years ago rings remarkably true today.
Newton Minow worried about the power of television, about pandering for ratings, about schlock on TV. Sound familiar? It still can be a wasteland. Studies say there's never been more meaningless sex and violence on the tube, suggesting: we never listened to the dire warnings of a 30-something lieutenant in the Kennedy White House. We hear from him again tonight, in my Closer Look.
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Newton Minow asked me to watch George Clooney's new movie before our interview. "Good Night, and Good Luck" begins with famed CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's 1958 speech to broadcasters in Chicago.
"We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent," Murrow said. He blasted the business, three years before Minow famously called television a "vast wasteland".
"Broadcasting cannot continue to live by the numbers," Minnow told his audience. "Ratings ought to be the slave of the broadcaster, not his master."
"The phone then rang," Minow recalls, "and it was Edward R. Murrow, who said, 'You stole my speech.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'That's the same speech I gave in 1958, in your hometown of Chicago.' "
The "vast wasteland" line made the youngest-ever federal communications chief an immediate cultural icon. The phrase lives as Minow's moniker.
"I was surprised that the words 'vast wasteland' lived on," he says. "In fact, they're in this week's issue [November 7, 2005] of Newsweek. It goes on. My kids tell me what they're going to put on my tombstone: 'onto a vaster wasteland.' "
At age 79, this highly successful Chicago lawyer still practices downtown. His office walls, a shrine to the history he's made.
"That was JFK's last birthday," Minow says, pointing to a faded picture.
"See Nixon? Next to him is John Conroy."
"I was a law clerk for Chief Justice Vincent."
"Who are you with there?"
"He was a commissioner on the FCC," Minow explains. "His name was [Tam] Craven. He came to see me the first day I was on the job. He said, 'Do you know what a communications satellite is?' I said 'no.' He groaned and said, 'I was afraid of that.' "
Just how did Minow become FCC chairman at age 34? He credits a walk in Springfield, Illinois, while he and roommate Bobby Kennedy worked on Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign.
"Bob said to me, he said, 'You and I have heard Adlai's speech 563 times. Do you know where Lincoln's house is? Do we have time to walk over there and come back?' "
On the way, they worried about the effects of this young medium.
"[Bobby Kennedy] said, 'When I was a child, there were three great influences on a child. The home, the school and the church.' He said, 'I see now, there's a fourth great influence: it's the television.' "
And so began a lifetime of fighting uphill to channel television closer to public service, further from mindless entertainment.
"The moment the ratings indicate Westerns are popular, there are new imitations of Westerns," Minow said in his famous speech to the National Association of Broadcasters.
"We're no better than we were when you were speaking in 1961, are we?"
"Senator Obama gave a talk today in Washington," Minow replies. "He said, unless you're a policeman watching every minute, kids are going to watch thousands of murders, all kinds of sex, and what we've done is deteriorate the broadcast standards in this country."
"This was not just an ordinary business. This was a business that impacted the public trust... President Kennedy once talked about that. He said, politicians and broadcasters really have the same job, and that is to lead and not just pander to what is the lowest common denominator."
Same with local newscasts, says Minow, who also teaches journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School.
"Journalists have got to be the conscience of the country," he says.
"Are we enough these days?" I ask.
"I would say 'no.' "
With a lifetime of hindsight, here's what Minow says he wished he'd done differently as FCC chairman. One, he'd fight even harder to limit the number of commercials on TV. Two, he'd make sure there was more regulation for cable and satellite channels -- two areas he opened up back then. That way, there'd be less junk on our eight hundred channels today. And here's what he says we in the local news business get wrong: we focus too much on two-bit crime, giving our viewers nothing to really care about.
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