BAR JOURNAL REVISITS MINOW'S 1961 ‘VAST WASTELAND’ SPEECH
“The Vast Wasteland Revisited” is the subject of the spring Federal Communications Law Journal, published Wed., which reexamines then-FCC Chmn. Newton Minow’s 1961 speech at the NAB convention and includes articles by Minow and more than 2 dozen others, including present and former commissioners.
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Minow said he would require TV stations, in return for their licenses, to provide children’s programming daily without commercials, offer free time to candidates and limit advertising to “let’s say 6 minutes per hour… If you don’t want to meet those requirements, there will be other people who will… Taken as an institution, I would give the FCC at the very best a B- and probably a C.” Said FCC Comr. Copps: “Rereading the vast wasteland speech today evokes an eerie sense of sameness… Minow’s description remains strikingly relevant” -- except for the demise of Westerns and “the rise of pervasive sex on the airwaves.” Comr. Abernathy said broadcasters “are the proper parties to make judgments” on media content.
First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere (ex-aide to ex-Comr. Quello) called the “vast wasteland” phrase “bold, pithy and in every important respect wrong,” while Aspen Institute’s Charles Firestone (also a former FCC staffer) called it “brave, brash and on point.” NAB Pres. Edward Fritts said today’s media landscape bore little resemblance to the 3-network era. Constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein said today’s media landscape “contains serious risks” because it could create an atmosphere where listeners and viewers weren’t exposed to “diverse topics and views but instead hear louder and louder echoes of their own preexisting convictions.” Ex-FCC Chmn. Richard Wiley said “TV is certainly the best value in the history of entertainment.”
Public interest attorney Henry Geller, FCC gen. counsel under Minow, called for the creation of a new broadcast regulatory scheme that would place commercial broadcasting’s public interest mandate on public broadcasting with increased federal funding. In return for not being required to provide public interest programming, commercial TV stations should be required to pay “a modest spectrum usage fee,” he said. The FCC’s effort to enforce “behavioral” content regulation “has been and will continue to be a failure,” Geller said -- fcate@indiana.edu or www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v55no3.html.