![]() There are exceptions, but if you are reading this column, you already know what they are: Frontline, Independent Lens, POV, and Nova (sometimes). Verdict: public broadcasting programming is as insipid and ingratiating as private television, but it is done with more nouveau bourgeois flair and less violence. But to be sure that my instincts were not just curmudgeonly musings of a middle aged man who can remember the hopes and promises of half a century ago, I did a spot check of last week and this week’s programming on KQED (San Francisco), WTTW (Chicago), and WGBH (Boston). My irritation with public broadcasting has been building for years. But I think the reformers of 50 years ago would be surprised to see what an onion in their imagined public petunia patch public broadcasting has become. Private broadcasters were never quite forced to promise us a rose garden, and their 50-year race to the bottom perhaps predictably has produced no roses. Reformers like Minnow not only insisted on regulating private broadcasters but also sponsored the growth of National Education Television and its transformation into the Public Broadcasting Service (1970). And I intend to see that your debt is paid with service.”įancy that: “the people own the air.” Doubtless Rupert Murdoch believes, in addition to thinking that it is okay for Fox News to be a political party, that he owns the cognitive and auditory spaces in our brains. For every hour that the people give you - you owe them something. And they own it as much in prime evening time as they do at six o'clock Sunday morning. Though a lifetime corporate lawyer and well-connected politico, as FCC Chair in 1961, Minow had something else important to say, and that he actually said it then shows us how far the profession of law has declined over the past 50 years: Still Newton Minow’s Kennedy Administration condemnation of America’s television programming still possesses the ring of truth, even if by now we are so inured to the medium’s fearsome banality. After all, how can one prattle on about the moral lesson of Vietnam without acknowledging that nothing was learned, and instead that Vietnam marked the moment in the postwar world when America took empire seriously on the road? Or that Kennedy’s sixties marked the high point of generalized American prosperity - not its beginning, but its last great act before the end? I am using the Kennedy rhetorical ploy here with less reverence and more irony than currently in play. For the next three years, we can count back by fifty years to our heart’s content, regardless of how banal or bloody the event, to a time when something happened then that could be used as a moral lesson now in the seemingly endless winter of our discontent. Kennedy Administration nostalgia is all the rage. –Newton Minow, Former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, May 9, 1961 And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.” True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. And endlessly commercials - many screaming, cajoling, and offending. 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. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. 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. “…When television is bad, nothing is worse.
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