From Vast Wasteland to electronic garden: responsibilities in the new video environment.

Newton Minow's "Vast Wasteland" speech (1) set a tone for his tenure at the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC"), and will forever be associated with Minow's very distinguished legal career. It was brave, brash, and on point. It suggested a lack of responsibility by television broadcasters to air cultural content, to balance crass entertainment with a wider variety of opinions and viewpoints, and to serve the local community as a public service in exchange for their public licenses.

Let us remember how different the period of Minow's domain was from the present. It was an era when stations such as Jackson, Mississippi's WLBT-TV segregated its programming with only white faces, (2) when networks relied on cigarette ads, (3) programmers fixed quiz shows, (4) and their radio brethren took payola to air pop records. (5) But it was also a time when news was thought of as a public service more than a profit center, when important political events, such as national political party conventions, were televised to the nation by all three networks and were watched by ninety percent of the television audience, and the World Series was played and televised during the daytime. Depending on one's vantage point, broadcasters of the 1950s were innocent, patronizing, or venal. But the point of Minow's speech was clear: There was good fare on the air, but most of what was on the screen was below the standards of those who put it there, below the spirit of public service to community, and below the potential of the medium. Minow urged the broadcasters in attendance to right their own ship, take responsibility, and cultivate the wasteland into an electronic garden.

REVOLUTIONS

Since those days, several revolutions have changed the landscape of television. We have seen the generational revolution of the 1960s, which brought with it, or followed, the civil rights movement, bringing forth advances in the rights of minorities, women, the disabled, the elderly, gays and lesbians, and a new attitude toward one's lifestyle. Perhaps as a part of this revolution, or as a revolution all its own, we have seen a sexual revolution, from the chaperon to the pill, from a public prudence to a level of acceptability for broadcasting offensive language, violence, innuendo, and skin, resulting in video fare on television that would simply have knocked the socks off the network censors of the 1950s.

Most significantly, we have seen a technological revolution, adding multi-channel delivery, digitization, interactivity, digital storage and retrieval, and with them all, greater consumer choice and more fractionalized audiences for the broadcaster. Increasingly, we have at our fingertips, literally, the best and worst the world has to offer.

It is difficult, however, to call the electronic delivery of video "television," because the form of programming, the delivery system, and the reception equipment have changed so radically. Today, almost all consumers watch video on a television screen, but as the screen becomes digital, as the delivery system also becomes digital and packet-switched over broadband, and as the programming becomes interactive, calling our screens "television" will be like "dialing" a number, or "typing" a page--a vestige in our language for a previous technology. For our purposes here, however, I will speak of television, and not allow the promise of the future to cloud the realities of the present.

THEN AND NOW

While these revolutions have been received differently depending on the eye of the viewer, one can no longer call television the "vast wasteland." Whatever failings television has today, it can provide a wide variety of quality programming to the consumer, a broad variety of viewpoints, particularly on cable (and more particularly on radio), and hours of local news that addresses at least some local needs and interests. While Minow had a few educational television stations in major cities, we now have public broadcasters in every market, and additional cultural, political, and documentary offerings on cable.

Television may no longer be a vast wasteland, but it has settled for being a "bad tasteland." Despite the technological revolutions of sight and sound, of delivery and replay, and of interactivity, the television of today is susceptible to the same complaints that Minow raised more than forty years ago. Indeed, to a certain extent, those look like the golden days, at least in terms of political coverage, serious debate, and classic drama.

Minow congratulated the networks in his speech for excellent fare and named programs he liked, ones that could be updated today to fare like 60 Minutes, The Sopranos, Hill Street Blues, Ken Burns's Civil War, and on and on. But Minow then stood back and urged broadcasters to critique the rest of the day.

What if we did that today? What would we find, and what could be done about it? In every category that Minow addressed, we are better and we are worse.

DIVERSITY

Minow's speech preceded the civil rights revolution, and his call for diversity was more in the form of viewpoints than in background. But in either case, television has much to be proud of, and much further to go, in providing diversity. I was fortunate to be a part of the public-interest movement in the 1970s that agitated for greater employment, coverage, and depiction of minorities, women, and the disabled in broadcasting. It would be a half-decade after Minow's speech until audiences even had standing to complain about a television license, (6) but from the United Church of Christ case forward for another fifteen years, audience groups, aided by precedents at the FCC and the courts, moved their local stations to recognizing the importance of carrying a diversity of voices and a diversity of people on the air.

Yet today, the number of stations owned by minorities is still miniscule, (7) broadcasters are no longer subject to detailed regulations to air controversial programming (8) or to "ascertain" the needs and interests of their audiences, (9) and licenses are routinely renewed by a postcard renewal system. There is more diversity available to the viewer than ever before, yet the potential is not nearly realized. Minorities remain on the outside, and many local issues do not see the light of a television screen.

PUBLIC SERVICE

Minow urged the broadcasters to rise to their status as public trustees by serving their local communities. Again, the amount of local news, traffic, weather, sports, and cultural reviews, taken together, is staggering, especially compared to the time when an urban area had three or four television stations, period. One could lump, as well, programs such as America's Most Wanted, Court TV, cable and satellite all-news channels (including local market all-news channels), and C-SPAN I and C-SPAN II as bringing the public's business more directly to the people. Prime Time, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Front Line, and other shows regularly offer investigative stories, many of which have led to concrete results.

Yet today, so much of the news is blood and guts, sensationalistic, personality-oriented, or even stories tied into made-for-television dramas aired the same night. Local public-service programming is often ghettoized to early Sunday mornings. Sex and violence leads the news, particularly during sweeps weeks, and media frenzies around the sensational story du jour are more commonplace than not.

DRAMA

In Minow's time one would talk about the Hallmark Hall of Fame, a live drama of high cultural content. Today we have the Hallmark Channel, Bravo, BBC America, a sophisticated public television system, and many more offerings of the highest quality, including the airing of virtually all significant movies since talkies came of age. High-quality drama series on network television bring an immediacy and reality about those who impact our daily lives, from understanding the street beat of the local police to the intricate strategies of the West Wing of the White House.

Yet, at the same time, there is a new baseness in the fare offered every night to the television audience: reality shows where we are voyeurs on private lives; where people are pitted against each other to survive on an island, or to land a husband on air; where humans are asked to act inhumanely or just plain stupidly. (10) Perhaps worse is the onslaught of violent interactive video games, increasingly a part of our children's screen presence.

WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY?

So what? Times change, values change. What Minow complained about, he urged the broadcasters to improve, and held out the possibility of license review as a potential sanction (though making it clear that he was not about to be a censor). Minow sought to place responsibility on the broadcaster, defining the government's role as active, though not censorious. Updating the point to the environment of 2003, and assuming that there is good and bad on the screen, whose responsibility is it today to see programming fare improve?

Certainly, the ability, let alone the inclination, of regulators to use the licensing process to affect programming directly is more questionable today than it was in Minow's time, and even he eschewed censorship. No one wants a government censor here, certainly not this Author. With the proliferation of broadcasting stations, the disparate treatment of broadcast and cable, and the clear elimination of scarcity in the delivery of streaming video over the Internet, the resort to government pressures is infeasible and undesirable. (11)

The broadcasters themselves, those who Minow asked to act on their own, have their own problems. With fractionalized audiences, networks get less than half the share of what they could expect in Minow's day. We are in an attention economy, where just attracting the eyes of the viewer is hard enough, let alone keeping them during commercials or zapping frenzies of the family remote controller. This is even more difficult as TiVos and other personal digital recorders make skipping a commercial child's play. Broadcasters can hardly help themselves in their competitive roles today, though they certainly could do more in terms of airing local issues, and particularly local candidates during elections.

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