Newton Minow, FCC chairman who assailed ‘vast wasteland’ of TV, dies at 97

Newton N. Minow, the Federal Communications Commission chairman who in 1961 memorably assailed TV as a “vast wasteland” and went on to have a towering impact on broadcasting by helping shape public television, satellite communications and presidential debates, died Saturday at his home in Chicago. He was 97.

The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Nell Minow, a top authority on corporate governance.

Minow was a politically connected Chicago legal grandee and boardroom Zelig whose professional life encompassed nearly every part of the communications business over six decades.

During World War II, he served in an Army battalion that built one of the first telephone lines between China and India. As a director of National Educational Television, a forerunner of the Public Broadcasting Service, he helped obtain the funding to put “Sesame Street” on the air in 1969. He later sat on the boards of CBS, the Tribune Co. and other major broadcasters, and he chaired the PBS board in the late 1970s.

Through prominent roles on panels and commissions, Minow also worked to create a template for the modern presidential debate format that has conferred on television a defining role, beyond political advertising, in the electoral process.

Ron Simon, a curator at the Paley Center for Media in New York, called Minow “a crucial figure in expanding TV’s possibilities.”

A former clerk for the chief justice of the United States, Minow had a quick and farsighted mind that in the 1950s helped him advance into the inner circles of Democratic presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson II, the onetime Illinois governor, and John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Two generations later, Minow helped promote the political rise of future President Barack Obama, who had been a summer associate in Minow’s Chicago law firm.

Minow was initially thrust into national attention as FCC chairman from 1961 to 1963, when he emerged as one of the boldest and most ambitious of President Kennedy’s New Frontiersmen.

The FCC mostly focused on issuing licenses for radio and television stations and setting rates for phone service, but Minow saw the job as a pulpit from which to evangelize for the public interest.

After all, he reasoned, the public owned the airwaves. And he had long been concerned – as a parent and as someone who understood TV’s ability to sway minds – by the proliferation of what he considered shallow, dollar-grubbing programming by the networks.

At 35, Minow was one of the youngest men to hold the FCC chairmanship when President Kennedy rewarded him with that assignment in 1961. At the time, the regulatory agency was reeling from payola scandals, involving bribes paid to disc jockeys in exchange for promotion of certain records, and rigged quiz shows. A popular joke was that the FCC’s initials stood for From Crisis to Crisis.

The FCC also was perceived to have been in the pocket of lobbyists and broadcast industry leaders. A chairman was forced to resign in 1960 after accepting a six-day cruise on the yacht of a radio and TV company president.

Minow set out to revive the agency as a watchdog.

In his first public address as FCC chairman, on May 9, 1961, he delivered a majestic bombshell at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Washington. Minow and his speechwriters borrowed from the poet T.S. Eliot and created an enduring catchphrase about the “vast wasteland” of the tube.

“When television is good, nothing – not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better,” he said. “But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. … I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

“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.”

He called for “a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives” and then threatened to hold up or revoke licenses for local TV stations; the FCC could not regulate the networks directly, only the stations they owned.

“There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license,” he said.

The thrust of the speech was not novel. In his celebrated “wires and lights in a box” address to peers in 1958, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow also called for the medium to illuminate and inspire, instead of just to entertain.

But as Richard Heffner, the historian and longtime public television host, once said, the “vast wasteland” talk was a “never-to-be-forgotten bearding right there in the lion’s very den” from the top federal regulator.

Minow drew recriminations from network executives, who called the speech sensationalized, oversimplified and unfair – elitist at best and evoking the specter of Soviet-style censorship at worst. Sherwood Schwartz, creator of the lowbrow 1960s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island,” reputedly named the marooned S.S. Minnow (with the extra N) after the FCC chief as a riposte.

The “vast wasteland” speech had little practical effect on commercial programming, but it was credited with reasserting the power of the FCC. Minow used the attention to win federal funding to greatly increase the number of educational television stations. The expanded network of stations would later coalesce into the Public Broadcasting Service in 1969.

In 1962, Minow helped foster legislation that required all TV sets to be manufactured with built-in UHF (ultrahigh frequency) tuners. The commercial networks dominated the crowded VHF (very high frequency) spectrum available on most TV sets until that time. Educational stations such as WETA in Washington used the UHF band.

Minow said he was initially ignorant of communications satellites but quickly grasped their importance in the Cold War and persuaded the president to spend political capital to hasten their development. He once told Kennedy they were more important than sending a man into space “because they will launch ideas, and ideas last longer than men and women.”

Minow helped persuade Congress to pass legislation that led to the creation of the Communications Satellite Corp., widely known as Comsat Corp., which over the decades became a major provider of satellite communications services.

In interviews, Minow liked to emphasize that he was a TV “junkie” who devoured news and sports programs, police dramas and sitcoms. He considered television a vital source of connectedness with the world, going so far as to place a TV in every room of his house – including the bathroom.

As he once said, “For people who tell me – academic intellectuals very often – ‘I don’t have a television set in my house,’ I tell them, ‘You’re not alive.’ “