Edward R. Murrow had already achieved the exalted status of broadcasting god when he came to Chicago to deliver a speech at the Blackstone Hotel. It was Oct. 15, 1958. Murrow’s topic was television, what he called “the money-making machine.” The speech would mark the beginning of the end of the legendary broadcaster’s brilliant career at CBS.
Fifty or a hundred years from now, Murrow said, historians would view tape of network programs and find “evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.”
“We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent,” Murrow said. “Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television . . . is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
“If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us,” Murrow said.
The Murrow speech, which he delivered to the Radio and Television News Directors Association, is part of broadcasting’s nearly forgotten lore. The memory of Murrow’s words was overwhelmed 2 1/2 years later when Newton Minow, President Kennedy’s newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, staked his claim in cultural history with a sound bite before they were known as sound bites. Television, Minow told the National Association of Broadcasters annual meeting, was “a vast wasteland.”
That was 40 years ago this week.
Murrow and Minow each had a vision of what television should be, and their disciples have confronted television industry executives for decades with complaints about televised sex, violence and overcommercialization and the failure to put TV’s potential to work for the public good.
People complain, TV execs said, yet people watch.
Even the harshest critics of television would have to admit that the so-called wasteland, while even more vast and mindless, is dotted with dozens of smart, provocative — and small — broadcast and cable programming oases every week.
For the discerning viewer, television offers more than it did 40 years ago, but only if they have cable, which 30 percent of the nation’s TV households do not have.
No one, though, should be terribly surprised by MTV’s “Jackass,” a program critics say encourages children to harm themselves with stunts they see on the show. Nor should people be shocked by CNN hiring for an anchor position Andrea Thompson, a former television and movie actress who has posed nude. Same goes for the upcoming ABC reality show in which commercial plugs will be woven into the program, in between the real commercials.
Lowest continues to plummet
Much of television today, from sexually suggestive sitcoms to local newscasts that portray inner cities as war zones wrapped in yellow police tape, seems to justify the headline in the current issue of the satirical weekly, The Onion: “Lowest Common Denominator Continues to Plummet.” The strip-tease newscast that gained fame in Russia has an Internet version in Canada. Don’t bet against something like that coming to a TV set near you.
And don’t be surprised. Why? Because the high-sounding public interest obligation that Murrow and Minow argued television should preserve has been all but run over by the steamroller of shareholder interests.
The clubby and elite broadcast world controlled by NBC’s Sarnoff, CBS’s Paley and ABC’s Goldenson has been overtaken by some of the biggest names in corporate America. AOL Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Walt Disney, News Corp. — each of them publicly traded companies — are the corporate caretakers of the networks now.
Other media companies, Tribune Co. and Gannett Co. among them, own large numbers of profitable TV stations, but they are not networks.
“There is no suggestion here that networks or individual stations should operate as philanthropies,” Murrow said in his 1958 speech. “But I can find nothing in the Bill of Rights or the Communications Act which says that they must increase their net profits each year, lest the Republic collapse.”
Murrow forgot about fiduciary responsibility. When Murrow and Minow took aim at television, ABC, CBS and NBC attracted the eyeballs of more than 90 percent of the television households. Their business was a warm and insular cocoon. No longer. The Big 3’s market share has been cut in half and their profits have plummeted because of the creation of new broadcast networks and dozens of cable channels.
Minow, now 75 and practicing law in Chicago, played an early and important role in expanding television choice by promoting the development of UHF, satellite and cable television.
“There was a wise person who once said competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people. There’s a lot of truth in that,” Minow said in an interview late last week. “But I’m not sure that’s true about television, I’m not sure that competition doesn’t bring out the worst in both.
“The biggest thing I did [at the FCC] was enlarge choice and increase competition. One of the things that has done, though, is create a race to the bottom.”
And a lucrative one it is.
50% profit margins
Individual television stations can reap profit margins in excess of 50 percent. That’s a big reason why the networks are pushing the current FCC to allow them to buy more stations.
Critics have long argued that television should serve a higher purpose, especially because its owners get free use of the broadcast spectrum.
One of the more glaring inconsistencies in federal communications policy is that telecommunications companies must pay billions of dollars in fees for use of the spectrum while broadcasters obtain it in exchange for vaguely defined public service obligations, such as news. News itself is going through its own creatively expansive redefinition, which includes reports on the latest developments in the CBS hit series “Survivor.”
The higher-purpose-for-television argument is analogous to advocates of the Internet, who should have known better when they envisioned people going home at night, logging onto their computers and accessing the Library of Congress.
The hoped-for portal of knowledge quickly became more like a portal of porn.
The government contributed to the television industry’s retreat from self-restraint when it challenged and effectively killed the broadcasters’ voluntary code of conduct through a lawsuit that said the code violated antitrust laws.
Four decades after Murrow and Minow took aim at television, it’s not at all clear whether the networks and television producers are creating the wasteland or are merely servicing the wasteland. Minow talks often about the definition of the public interest and challenges those who suggest “the public interest is what interests the public.”
“If that’s the case you’d put on X-rated movies,” he added.
That doesn’t sound so far-fetched these days.
Television is what it is because it is beholden to market forces that don’t recognize the concept of public interest. “I’ve been in this business for a long time,” Minow said. “I’ve never met anyone in the business who got up in the morning and asked `How many kids can I harm today?’ What you’ve got is basically good people caught in a bad system where a 10th of a rating point may mean your job. That’s the sad part of the story. It’s a bad system.”
Last month one of Minow’s successors to the FCC chairmanship, Michael Powell, visited the NAB convention and gave the broadcasters every reason to believe that, unlike the FCC under President Bill Clinton, this commission will be free market-oriented.
Once again, don’t be surprised by anything that happens.
