A Look Back at 30 Years of TV’s ‘Vast Wasteland’ : Television: On the anniversary of his now-famous phrase, former FCC chairman and retiring CBS board member Newton Minow recalls broadcasting’s failures.

Thirty years ago today, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission dropped a two-word bomb on broadcasting. The landscape of television, Newton Minow declared, was a “vast wasteland.”

Although he praised some news and entertainment shows as worthwhile, the rest, Minow said, was “a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies . . . more violence . . . Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes . . . cartoons . . . and, endlessly, commercials.”

Minow warned his audience--the annual convention of the National Assn. of Broadcasters--that renewal of a TV station’s license by the FCC was not an automatic right. Instead, he said, he intended to enforce broadcasters’ responsibility to give “a decent return to the public--not only to your stockholders.”

“I wanted citizens to realize that the public owns the airwaves,” recalled the 65-year-old Minow, who is now a Chicago lawyer, a member of the board of directors of CBS, Inc. and director of the Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies of Northwestern University. “I hadn’t expected the phrase ‘vast wasteland’ to become so popular. My children have threatened to engrave on my tombstone, ‘On to a vaster wasteland!’ ”

Broadcasters were outraged by Minow’s affront. But the public overwhelmingly supported the bespectacled New Frontiersman. And, in the climate created by Minow’s speech, the networks increased public-affairs programming, decreased violence and put on several “family” series in what one trade publication at the time called “one post-Minow swoop.”

Tonight, Minow is commemorating the 30th anniversary of his famous speech with an address about the state of television at the Gannett Foundation Media Center in New York. His theme: “Today, 30 years later, we have expanded television enormously, but we still waste its vast potential.”

Between the troubles of the networks today and the effects of years of government deregulation of television, the TV landscape now is quite different from the 1960s. While he is sympathetic to the networks’ new financial concerns, Minow said in an interview, “Deregulation has been very bad for the viewer because TV today is seen as just another business. The government abdicated its responsibility by deregulating television in the 1980s. I reject the view (expressed by former FCC chairman Mark Fowler) that ‘a television set is merely a toaster with pictures.’ As long as there are 28 people screaming for (the license to operate) a TV station, the government should insist on some return to the public.

“Why is it that fyn-syn (the debate between networks and movie studios over lucrative rerun rights) is the main preoccupation of the FCC rather than children’s programming?” Minow continued. “Instead of grudging, reluctant interpretation of the new law passed by Congress requiring a number of hours and some limit on commercials in children’s television, the FCC should be championing that law.”

If he were chairman of the FCC today, Minow said, he would enforce the pre-deregulation standards while, at the same time, trying to find ways to address what broadcasters say are their competitive disadvantages against cable television.

“I would try to figure out some way to give equitable treatment to over-the-air broadcasters to redress the balance between broadcasting and cable, which has two sources of revenue, advertising and subscribers. But having done that, I would have no problem insisting on the standards that required that a certain amount of attention and time be given to news and public affairs.”

Minow, who this week is retiring from the CBS board after eight years as a director, said of all three broadcast networks, “The new owners have paid so much money for what they got that they’re under economic pressure just to handle their debt service. They’re in a very tough economic environment today, with advertising going down and competition going up.”

At the same time, he said, “The fault I would give to the networks is a failure to foresee what was happening in television. For example, when CBS started a cable network years ago (under founder William S. Paley), they made it a cultural network. Suppose they’d made it a news network--would CNN have succeeded? I have a theory that the reason that Ted Turner did what he did with CNN was that he came from outside broadcasting and didn’t know all the rules.”

Since leaving the FCC in 1963 to pursue his private law practice, Minow has been active in public television. He was a director of PBS from 1973-1980, including a two-year term as chairman of PBS. He also was director of the bipartisan advisory commission for the 1988 Presidential debates.

Minow cites public television as one area where TV has not fulfilled its promise. “When the Carnegie Commission in the 1960s came up with the plan that led to public television,” Minow recalled, “they proposed an excise tax on television sets, with money earmarked to support PBS. That never occurred. Unlike many other nations, public television in this country has never had a solid base of support. Consequently, PBS is always begging for money and is shortchanged.”

One means of supporting public television, Minow said, would be for Congress to institute a small spectrum-use or franchise fee for commercial broadcasters and cable operators. An annual fee of 2% on broadcasting and cable’s $50 billion total annual revenues, Minow said, would produce about $1 billion a year. That’s not likely to be welcomed by broadcasters or cablecasters, but, he said, Japan currently spends 20 times as much per person for public broadcasting as the United States.

Looking at the future of television, Minow said that new technologies are likely to shape TV in ways that are yet unknown.

“Technology is going to change everything,” he said. “I think there’s going to be a real convergence of technologies--joining TV and computers and telephones and FAX machines--into one thing. I’ve already seen that (as a member of the board of directors) in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where they’re going to put an encyclopedia onto a new computer disc, so that a child will be able to look up Brahms’ biography and hear some of his music in stereo.”

With such rapidly changing technology, Minow argued, it is even more important for the country to pay attention to public-policy questions in television.

“Television is one of our most important enterprises in this country, and yet, as a nation, we have never paid very much attention to what we expect of television. As technology changes, the TV business will change. Technology must be accompanied by some thought about public policy. That’s the trick in our free society.”