Fifty years ago, then Chair of the Federal Communications Commission Newton Minow appeared before the National Association of Broadcasters and gave what remains the most significant speech about electronic media in American history. In it, Minow excoriated the broadcasting industry.

“When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better,” he began. “But when television is bad,” he warned, “nothing is worse.”

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

Sitting there, viewers would see a “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.”

Like so many media reformers, Minow strikes me as reluctant to acknowledge an obvious difference between 1961 and 2011. TV is not a vast wasteland anymore. It’s a crazy, weed-filled, wonderful, out-of-control garden.

“True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy,” the FCC’s boss conceded. “But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.”

In the latest edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Minow thoughtfully looks back on that moment in a piece titled A Vaster Wasteland.

“I knew broadcasters would not be happy,” he winks, taking wicked pleasure in the response of Hollywood producer Sherwood Schwartz, who named the sinking vessel in his hit TV series Gilligan’s Island “The Minnow.”

The “vast wasteland” phrase represented “a metaphor for a particular time in our nation’s communications history,” Minow notes, “and to my surprise it became part of the American lexicon. It has come to identify me.”

Minow also takes credit for some of the FCC’s achievements in the 1960s, most notably breakthroughs in communication satellite technology and the rise of public broadcasting. “But our failures were equally dramatic, particularly in using television to serve our children and to improve our politics,” he writes.

For fifty years, we have bombarded our children with commercials disguised as programs and with endless displays of violence and sexual exploitation. We are nearly alone in the democratic world in not providing our candidates with public-service television time. Instead we make them buy it—and so money consumes and corrupts our political discourse.

I agree with almost all the recommendations that Minow makes in the essay — including extending free TV airtime to presidential candidates and his oblique support for the FCC’s open Internet rules. But I’ve lived through the last 50 years of TV history, too. And like so many media reformers, Minow strikes me as reluctant to acknowledge an obvious difference between 1961 and 2011. Television is not a vast wasteland anymore. It’s a crazy, weed-filled, wonderful, out-of-control garden.

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