TV: Is it still ‘a vast wasteland’?

Fifty years ago this week, Newton Minow delivered one of the “most electrifying speeches ever given by a bureaucrat,” said Aaron Barnhart in The Kansas City Star. The newly named head of the Federal Communications Commission boldly told a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters that the television shows they’d produced were a waste of the public airwaves. The two-word phrase he used to describe television’s landscape of Westerns, private-eye mysteries, formulaic comedies, and game shows—a “vast wasteland”—has since joined the cultural lexicon as “shorthand for bad TV.” And half a century later, said James Warren in The New York Times, Minow’s “excoriation” still has power. The medium has certainly evolved since 1961, but is it any better?

Yes, it is, said Newton Minow in the Chicago Tribune. There’s still plenty of junk on TV, but the medium is now “far vaster than we could have imagined in 1961,” and much of what’s now available has “far exceeded my most ambitious dreams.” Whereas TV was once purely an “entertainment medium” catering to the lowest common denominator, we now have dozens of channels offering quality news and entertainment programming, such as CNN, PBS, HBO, Showtime, and A&E. Thanks to cable, we’re in an “era of choice,” said Tim Brooks in Advertising Age. When Minow denounced TV, there were only three networks, with “little room for experimentation or nonmainstream programming.” Now, with the click of a remote, the average viewer can select from a world of options—from “lowbrow” reality TV like American Idol to intelligent drama like Mad Men to brilliant comedy like South Park. You can’t call a medium “tailored to so many tastes” a wasteland.

Give Minow’s famous critique some credit for that, says Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times. Some broadcasters decided to “prove him wrong,” and they created the nightly news programs, 60 Minutes, and PBS, with its lineup of Sesame Street and Frontline. Other broadcasters chose to show high-minded elitists that TV could be both popular and of high quality. Thanks to their efforts, we’ve had “golden age after golden age” of TV: from Cheers to The Office; from Hill Street Blues to The Wire; from M*A*S*H to The Sopranos. Minow’s smackdown of TV, in other words, “may be the best thing that ever happened to it.”

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