On Television

...The so-called bad programs are worse than ever, and that's the way the people who watch, say, the audience participation shows like them...

...Actually, only about a half-dozen ex-commissioners have joined the networks, but many others have become station owners or joined law firms that are part of the FCC bar...

...I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland...

...Gentlemen, your trust accounting with your beneficiaries is overdue...

...Even Fred Friendly, who should know better, made the same suggestion in his book, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control (1969...

...This is an honorable tradition dating back to Henry A. Bellows, who in 1932 graduated from the Federal Radio Commission to a vice-presidency at cbs...

...And CBS-tv President Robert Wood went so far as to ignore the program's poor ratings—another thing Minow attacked the broadcasters for not doing in 1961...

...You will see," he explained, "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...

...they just pick the least objectionable show...

...The part of the speech that made Newton Minow famous as a critic began: "When television is good, nothing —not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—is better...

...depth...

...The first half-century of the printing press is known by scholars as prima typographiae incunabula ("the cradle period...

...If you want to stay on as trustees, you must deliver a decent return to the public—not only to your stockholders...

...This was the standard technical mumbo-jumbo of broadcasting, which even the broadcasters don't understand...

...Tis much better to be ignorant of the disease than to catch it...

...The noted television scholar, Paul Klein, recently published a paper explaining that people don't really care which programs are broadcast...

...Minow's speech, to the best of my knowledge, marked the first time an FCC chairman ever went on record as having watched television—a major breakthrough for an agency sometimes known as the Federal Comatose Commission...

...Did he expect us to believe they didn't know what they were putting on the air...

...Minow was appalled by what he saw on tv, but he soon got over it...

...It took 32 seconds," one industry veteran recalls...

...It obviously was the conclusion of a careful study he had made about television since taking over the FCC a year earlier...

...Who would wound himself for information about pain or smell a stench for the sake of discovery...

...Your license lets you use the public airwaves as trustees for 180 million Americans," Minow explained...

...A writer's mind is of great importance to him—second only to his fingers...

...Henry concluded that the FCC had made a gallant fight, that the people were now aware of the problem, and that his next target would be loud commercials...

...I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet, or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off...

...During the first season I watched television lor this magazine, I began to suspect that I was losing my mind...

...Some critics are difficult to please...

...The junk around us...

...Admittedly, violence has diminished on the private-eye thrillers that Minow complained about...

...I don't mean to imply there was anything improper in this...

...And, endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling and offending...

...Situation comedies are also more diverse than during Minow's reign...

...I keep up with Newton Minow these days about as much as he watched tv in the old days...

...So it won't be a total loss, I am planning to apply for workmen's compensation...

...Former FCC commissioners often go to work in th...

...But that's not tv's fault...

...Ten years ago, who would ever have expected to see the night when I. F. Stone would star on abc—even if it was only on the Dick Cavett Show...

...One might well ask what Minow would have expected the broadcasters to find on their stations: originality...

...As part of my celebration of that landmark in tv history, I read the complete text of the Minow speech for the first time...

...His most memorable fight was an attempt to limit the amount of airtime for commercials...

...Horowitz, Rubinstein, Glenn Gould, all feel the same way about their hands...

...Even in the context of Minow's more conventional brand of criticism, the medium has improved...

...This wasn't just the former chairman's offhand opinion...

...But it's easy to see how he might have gotten that impression...

...He left his post as critic-in-residence and found a job as counsel for one of the three cultural oases in the wasteland (cbs...

...It took 200 years for somebody to think of the idea of writing a novel...

...Sometimes I think impatience with television's development as an art form stems from a lack of historical perspective, tv may not seem to change very much from year to year or even from decade to decade...

...No wonder the broadcasters didn't jump to their feet to cheer his address that afternoon...

...But a good case can be made for the theory that prolonged exposure to television may damage the mind...

...For example, the nation's bigots now have their own program, All in the Family, CBS has proved this season that television's long-standing fear of ideas was exaggerated...

...A mere handful of television viewers, maybe 2 million Americans at most, spend 18 hours a day in front of their home screens...

...THE FUNCTION of television, it has always seemed to me, is to drive people out of the house, from the world of fantasy to the world of reality...

...In this sense, it's doing a better job than it is given credit for...

...Minow said it was "half-vast...

...This is a hazard of more concern to the critic than to the average viewer...

...What nonsense...

...The industry has long been dangling offers before the present critic-in-residence...

...Whenever I'm depressed by the lack of imagination displayed in the annual television schedules, I console myself by asking why no one sat down to write a novel as soon as printing was invented...

...an intellectual paradisc...

...All in the Family may not be doing much to cure the problem of bigotry, but there hasn't been a single race riot or pogrom on a Tuesday night all year...

...The industry doesn't cater to this small minority of eccentrics...

...exclaimed the creative genius whose production company, Talent Ltd., was one of the industry's major program suppliers...

...Only two of his words are still remembered, but that's a lot for a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman...

...But when television is bad, nothing is worse...

...industry they had been regulating...

...The talk shows now have controversial guests, too...

...Usually the commissioners are far too busy watching the lobbyists to watch the programs...

...It programs for the people who spend only five or six consecutive hours in front of the tube...

...It now turns up on the extended news shows critics always cite as good programing...

...The sea of junk...

...Although that usually requires the loss of an arm or a leg, there's no reason why a man shouldn't be compensated for mental retardation incurred on the job...

...Much of the address (delivered at the 39th annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters) was inside trade talk...

...I don't really believe radiation is a significant danger to the brain, one of the explanations given for the small number of viewers who watch television in the Minow manner...

...All experiments are not worth the making," Collier wrote in the introduction to A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698...

...In the category of pugnacious FCC chairmen, my own favorite is E. William Henry, who succeeded Minow in the early '60s...

...I never make any repairs around the house for fear of injuring my typing fingers...

...The evidence in these columns over the years tends to confirm my suspicion...

...The series ordinarily would have been dropped next season, but Wood has kept it as a matter of principle...

...A reporter at Newsday called Minow (now a successful Chicago attorney, chairman of the board of trustees at two public television stations, and a teacher at Northwestem's graduate school of journalism) to ask what he thought of television today...

...The public is your beneficiary...

...As nyu Professor Neil Postman has put it, "We are now in the period of prima tele-visionis incunabula—and the cradle is beginning to rock...

...The notion that programing would be improved by chaining top tv executives to their sets for a full day and night is one of the most persistent myths of broadcasting...

...Still, I bet if more Americans could afford geisha girls to help them relax after a hard day's work, they wouldn't need tv violence...

...Never have so few owed so much to so many...

...But I digress...

...Broadcasters often act like followers of Jeremy Collier, a media authority of the pre-McLuhan era...

...On the face of it, Minow's suggestion to the broadcasters was libelous...

...But it is important to remember that it wasn't until 75 years after the invention of printing that some genius thought of numbering the pages in a book...

...Nicholas Johnson...

...The fastest piece of legislation in history...

...But he came to my attention again in a recent newspaper story marking the anniversary of the "vast wasteland" speech...

...Congress immediately passed a bill taking away the commission's right to meddle in this area...

...Minow was reciting the obvious, something even David Susskind said better that same year...