The “Vast Wasteland” in Retrospect

First, a disclosure: I was a newly minted legal assistant to Newton Minow in May 1961, when the speech was given. (1) I and several other staff members had sought to persuade him to drop the "vast wasteland" phrase. I thought it was too intellectual--the broadcasters would hate the speech in any case and the wider public whose support Minow sought would not get the reference to the Eliot poem. Minow first agreed, and then at his wife's urging, put the phrase back in. The subsequent public reaction--which made the "vast wasteland" phrase famous--put paid to any pretensions I might have had to expertise in public relations. Whatever I thought of its language, however, I was a committed supporter of the speech's substance, including its central demand that commercial telecasters provide programming that was socially worthy but undervalued by the commercial market. Yet today the speech reads like the relic of a bygone geologic age. This Essay attempts to explain why this should be so. It is not, to begin with, that the intellectual bases for Minow's activist stance toward broadcast program regulation have been decisively refuted. Consider the thesis that activist program regulation is warranted by the scarcity of broadcast frequencies; i.e., that the government may or must allocate limited frequencies to different uses, and that it cannot in so doing avoid responsibility for the social worth of the uses (as well as the users) that it licenses. (2) Even before 1961, this claim had been attacked by Ronald Coase, in a now-famous article which demonstrated that the electromagnetic spectrum is no more limited than any other economic resource; that the government could in principle define property rights in the use of the spectrum, auction them off (or dispose of them to private parties by lottery or some other means), and let them be, thereafter, allocated to different uses and users by the forces of the market. (3) Since 1961, it has become commonplace for scholars and jurists to treat that demonstration as a total refutation of the claim that "frequency scarcity" justifies the regulation of broadcast program content. (4) But the conclusion does not follow automatically from the premise. Clearly, if frequency allocation and use were determined solely by property rights and market forces, no one could point to "frequency scarcity" as a reason that the government may or must assume responsibility for broadcast program content. (5) But while Federal Communication Commission ("FCC" or "Commission") broadcast licenses have many of the features of de facto property rights, (6) the government has continued to determine the allocation and use of broadcast frequencies, and there is no likelihood that this situation will change anytime soon. It does not matter whether one ascribes the persistence of the government allocation model to a general perception of its superior merit, (7) or to an unholy (if tacit) alliance among rent-seeking broadcasters, politicians, and bureaucrats. (8) So long as we continue to base broadcast frequency allocations on government judgments of the "public interest" to be served, the argument that those judgments may or must consider broadcast program content will remain viable. That we could deal with broadcast frequency scarcity in some other fashion does not warrant reasoning as if we were already doing so. The "frequency scarcity" thesis has been strengthened, moreover, by the current vogue for its kissing cousin--the belief that "the public owns the airwaves." (9) Ironically, in 1961, the "public ownership" thesis was little more than a rhetorical flourish with no independent power to turn the crank of legal analysis. (10) Section 304 of the Communications Act, which was derived from the Radio Act of 1927, provided then (as it does now) that license applicants must waive any right to the spectrum "as against the regulatory power of the United States." (11) That choice of language was deliberately intended to foreclose any claim that the government owns the spectrum as it does public lands. …