Ex-FCC chief, public TV advocate Newton Minow lifeless at 97

CHICAGO — Newton N. Minow, who as Federal Communications Commission chief within the early Nineteen Sixties famously proclaimed that community tv was a “vast wasteland,” died Saturday. He was 97.

Minow, who acquired a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, died Saturday at residence, surrounded by family members, stated his daughter, Nell Minow.

“He wanted to be at home,” she advised The Associated Press. “He had a good life.”

Though Minow remained within the FCC submit simply two years, he left a everlasting stamp on the broadcasting business by authorities steps to foster satellite tv for pc communications, the passage of a regulation mandating UHF reception on TV units and his outspoken advocacy for high quality in tv.

“My faith is in the belief that this country needs and can support many voices of television – and that the more voices we hear, the better, the richer, the freer we shall be,” Minow as soon as stated. “After all, the airways belong to the people.”

Minow was appointed as FCC chief by President John F. Kennedy in early 1961. He had initially come to know the Kennedys within the Nineteen Fifties as an aide to Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956.

Minow laid down his well-known problem to TV executives on May 9, 1961, in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, urging them to sit down down and watch their station for a full day, “without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you.”

“I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland,” he advised them. “You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials – many screaming, cajoling and offending.”

As he spoke, the three networks had been nearly all most viewers had to select from. Pay tv was barely within the starting stage, PBS and “Sesame Street” had been a number of years away, and HBO and area of interest channels similar to Animal Planet had been far sooner or later.

The speech triggered a sensation. “Vast wasteland” grew to become a catch phrase. Jimmy Durante opened an NBC particular by saying, “Da next hour will be dedicated to upliftin’ da quality of television. … At least, Newt, we’re tryin’.”

Minow grew to become the primary authorities official to get a George Foster Peabody award for excellence in broadcasting. The New York Times critic Jack Gould (himself a Peabody winner) wrote, “At long last there is a man in Washington who proposes to champion the interests of the public in TV matters and is not timid about ruffling the industry’s most august feathers. Tonight some broadcasters were trying to find dark explanations for Mr. Minow’s attitude. In this matter the viewer possibly can be a little helpful; Mr. Minow has been watching television.”

CBS President Frank Stanton strongly disagreed, calling Minow’s feedback a “sensationalized and oversimplified approach” that might result in ill-advised reforms “on the ground that any change is a change for the better.”

For the criticism over his speech, Minow stated he didn’t assist censorship, preferring exhortation and measures to broaden public selections. But he additionally stated a broadcasting license was “an enormous gift” from the federal government that introduced with it a duty to the general public.

His daughter, Nell Minow, advised The Associated Press in 2011 that her father cherished tv and wished he would have been remembered for championing the general public curiosity in tv programming, fairly than just some phrases in his a lot broader speech.

“His No. 1 goal was to give people choice,” she stated.

Among the brand new legal guidelines throughout his tenure had been the All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962, that required that TV units decide up UHF in addition to VHF broadcasts, which opened up TV channels numbered above 13 for widespread viewing. Congress additionally handed a invoice that supplied funds for academic tv, and measures to foster communications satellites.

In a September 2006 interview on National Public Radio, Minow recalled telling Kennedy that such satellites had been “more important than sending a man into space. … Communications satellites will send ideas into space, and ideas live longer than people.” On July 10, 1962, Minow was one of many officers making statements on the primary stay trans-Atlantic tv program, an illustration of AT&T’s Telstar satellite tv for pc.

Children’s programming was a specific curiosity of Minow, a father of three, who advised broadcasters the few good youngsters’s exhibits had been “drowned out in the massive doses of cartoons, violence and more violence. … Search your consciences and see if you cannot offer more to your young beneficiaries whose future you guide so many hours each and every day.”

Minow resigned in May 1963 to develop into government vp and normal counsel for Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. in Chicago.

Nell Minow stated her father additionally was instrumental in getting presidential debates televised, beginning with Kennedy and Richard N. Nixon, after watching Stevenson battle to make use of the brand new medium throughout his 1956 presidential run.

“Minow was appalled by … the whole charade of having to image-make on television,” stated Craig Allen, a mass communications professor at Arizona State University who wrote a 2001 ebook about Minow.

In 1965, Minow returned to his regulation apply in Chicago, and later served as board member at PBS, CBS Inc. and the promoting firm Foote Cone & Belding Communications Inc. He was director of the Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies of Northwestern University.

He additionally gave Barack Obama a summer time job on the regulation agency, the place the longer term president met his spouse, Michelle Robinson. Minow additionally was certainly one of Obama’s earliest supporters when the then-Illinois senator thought-about working for president, Nell Minow stated.

Television is certainly one of our century’s most necessary advances “and yet, as a nation, we pay no attention to it,” Minow stated in a 1991 Associated Press interview.

He continued to push for reforms similar to free airtime for political adverts and extra high quality programming whereas additionally praising advances in variety in U.S. tv.