The network television lineup for that Tuesday night in May wasn’t unusual, certainly nothing to set it apart from the fare offered the other six nights of the week.
Among the prime-time programs were “The Rifleman,” “Wyatt Earp,” “Stagecoach West,” “Father Knows Best,” “Dobie Gillis,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Laramie” and a documentary.
But the regular menu of programming 33 years ago had caught the attention of Newton Minow, then the newly appointed, 35-year-old chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who earlier that day had fired a shot into the bow of the TV industry by calling its on-the-screen product “a vast wasteland.”
Although TV survived Minow’s attack, the remark has lived on as the most enduring and damning indictment of the television industry.
“You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons,” Minow told the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961.
What about today? The prime-time cowboys and the cartoons have almost vanished, but has anything really changed?
Yes, said Minow in an interview last week.
And no.
Television, as broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow observed in 1958, is still “being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us,” Minow said. The quality of local TV news has disturbingly deteriorated because of “skewed” news values determined by a bottom-line, market-oriented mentality, he said. Television’s concentration on violence in entertainment programs has taught children that violence is a problem-solver. “We’ve become immune to it,” he said.
But the majority of viewers, Minow said, at least have a much broader selection to fill the more than seven hours of TV they watch daily.
“If you are a picky viewer, if you take the trouble to look through the TV Guide and consciously choose what you want to see, what you want your family to see, there’s a lot of stuff available,” Minow said. “Most people don’t do that. Most people, unfortunately, turn on the television rather than a program.”
That is the nub of the problem for Minow, counsel to the Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin, former chairman of the Public Broadcasting Service, one-time board member at CBS and current member of several corporate boards, including Tribune Co. Television is a mostly private communications medium operating under an undefined government requirement of serving the public interest. It is broadcast to a largely passive public that wants to be entertained, not educated.
On the apparent eve of what is expected to be a great expansion in the number of channels available to Americans, the potential of television is once again up for debate. Minow views television as the nation’s most influential-for better or for worse-educational institution.
“They talk about shopping malls and a movie every 10 minutes. I want to talk about the implications for teaching and education, for health care, for crime prevention. All these things are more important in the long run than entertainment,” he said.
“Most people, I concede, will opt for the easy things, the more popular things.”
Including, sometimes, Minow. There is no obvious presence of a TV in his 48th-floor downtown office. But a pocket TV is buried beneath a raincoat in a drawer behind his desk. And when Minow gets home, he’ll tune in the national news programs, CNN, C-SPAN and sports. He makes a point of watching “NYPD Blue,” “L.A. Law” and, occasionally, “Picket Fences.”
“On the entertainment side, sure, people want `Seinfeld.’ I want `L.A. Law,’ I don’t want a documentary on the situation in Bosnia. I’m tired at the end of the day, too. But the point is,” he said, “stations need to provide it all.”
Some recent signs are not, by Minow’s standards, encouraging.
Tele-Communications Inc.’s Chicago Cable system has made room for Fox’s new fX Network by bumping Mind Extension University off the air. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is paying NBC $2.5 million for air time to broadcast a two-hour, commercial-free special on health-care reform that the network, if it had chosen to, could have produced on its own.
And local Chicago television stations are busy with the countdown toward convicted mass murderer John Wayne Gacy’s scheduled execution at midnight Monday.
Still, many choices are available for those who look around. Monday night prime time offers popular titles: “Evening Shade” from CBS, “Fresh Prince” from NBC, “Day One” from ABC and “Revenge of the Nerds IV” on Fox. There also are two baseball games, an NBA playoff game, the cerebral “Chicago Tonight,” and specials on black bears, the Civil War and jet-engine development.
That’s only at 7 o’clock-and only if you have cable. The measure of TV’s widening selection is attributable primarily to cable and Public Broadcasting, Minow said. About 60 percent of the nation’s households have cable, but he does not expect all homes to be wired soon.
“I’m relatively optimistic about the future as long as choice gets expanded, poor people don’t get priced out of the market and we don’t think only about entertainment. This technology can make life better in a lot of ways besides offering more movies,” he said.
Minow is writing a book on television, looking at its failures, particularly with children. He is far from the government arena, but does sometimes wonder what he would do if he were in a position of absolute power.
“I would require that everyone who produces a television program have to watch it with their own kids. I say it in a way facetiously,” he said with a smile, “and in a way seriously.”
