From Vast Wasteland to Electronic Garden: Responsibilities in the New Video Environment

Newton Minow's "Vast Wasteland" speech (1) set a tone for his tenure at the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC"), and will forever be associated with Minow's very distinguished legal career. It was brave, brash, and on point. It suggested a lack of responsibility by television broadcasters to air cultural content, to balance crass entertainment with a wider variety of opinions and viewpoints, and to serve the local community as a public service in exchange for their public licenses. Let us remember how different the period of Minow's domain was from the present. It was an era when stations such as Jackson, Mississippi's WLBT-TV segregated its programming with only white faces, (2) when networks relied on cigarette ads, (3) programmers fixed quiz shows, (4) and their radio brethren took payola to air pop records. (5) But it was also a time when news was thought of as a public service more than a profit center, when important political events, such as national political party conventions, were televised to the nation by all three networks and were watched by ninety percent of the television audience, and the World Series was played and televised during the daytime. Depending on one's vantage point, broadcasters of the 1950s were innocent, patronizing, or venal. But the point of Minow's speech was clear: There was good fare on the air, but most of what was on the screen was below the standards of those who put it there, below the spirit of public service to community, and below the potential of the medium. Minow urged the broadcasters in attendance to right their own ship, take responsibility, and cultivate the wasteland into an electronic garden. REVOLUTIONS Since those days, several revolutions have changed the landscape of television. We have seen the generational revolution of the 1960s, which brought with it, or followed, the civil rights movement, bringing forth advances in the rights of minorities, women, the disabled, the elderly, gays and lesbians, and a new attitude toward one's lifestyle. Perhaps as a part of this revolution, or as a revolution all its own, we have seen a sexual revolution, from the chaperon to the pill, from a public prudence to a level of acceptability for broadcasting offensive language, violence, innuendo, and skin, resulting in video fare on television that would simply have knocked the socks off the network censors of the 1950s. Most significantly, we have seen a technological revolution, adding multi-channel delivery, digitization, interactivity, digital storage and retrieval, and with them all, greater consumer choice and more fractionalized audiences for the broadcaster. Increasingly, we have at our fingertips, literally, the best and worst the world has to offer. It is difficult, however, to call the electronic delivery of video "television," because the form of programming, the delivery system, and the reception equipment have changed so radically. Today, almost all consumers watch video on a television screen, but as the screen becomes digital, as the delivery system also becomes digital and packet-switched over broadband, and as the programming becomes interactive, calling our screens "television" will be like "dialing" a number, or "typing" a page--a vestige in our language for a previous technology. For our purposes here, however, I will speak of television, and not allow the promise of the future to cloud the realities of the present. THEN AND NOW While these revolutions have been received differently depending on the eye of the viewer, one can no longer call television the "vast wasteland." Whatever failings television has today, it can provide a wide variety of quality programming to the consumer, a broad variety of viewpoints, particularly on cable (and more particularly on radio), and hours of local news that addresses at least some local needs and interests. While Minow had a few educational television stations in major cities, we now have public broadcasters in every market, and additional cultural, political, and documentary offerings on cable. …