Breaking news: Newton N. Minow, the Federal Communications Commission chairman who in 1961 memorably assailed TV as a “vast wasteland” and had a towering impact on broadcasting by helping shape public television, died at his home in Chicago. He was 97.
The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Nell Minow, a top authority on corporate governance.
A onetime clerk for the chief justice of the United States, Mr. Minow had a quick and far-sighted mind that in the 1950s helped him advance into the inner circles of Democratic presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson II, the onetime Illinois governor, and John F. Kennedy, then a Massachusetts senator. Two generations later, Mr. Minow helped promote the political rise of future president Barack Obama, who had been a summer associate in Mr. Minow’s Chicago law firm.Mr.
The FCC also was perceived to have been in the pocket of lobbyists and broadcast industry leaders. A chairman was forced to quit in 1960 after having accepted a six-day cruise on the yacht of a radio and TV company president.as FCC chairman, on May 9, 1961, he delivered a majestic bombshell at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Washington. Mr. Minow and his speechwriters borrowed from poet T.S. Eliot and created an enduring catchphrase about the “vast wasteland” of the tube.
Mr. Minow drew recriminations from network executives, who called the speech sensationalized, oversimplified and unfair — elitist at best and evoking the specter of Soviet-style censorship at worst. Sherwood Schwartz, creator of the low-brow 1960s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island,” reputedly named the marooned S.S. Minnow after the FCC chief as a riposte.The “vast wasteland” speech had little practical effect on commercial programming, but it was credited with reasserting the power of the FCC. Mr.
He was active in Stevenson’s failed presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956, in the latter race trying unsuccessfully to persuade his boss to make then-Sen. John Kennedy his running mate. Mr. Minow was Stevenson’s law partner in Chicago when Kennedy tapped him to lead the FCC. That rule forced the inclusion of even fringe-party candidates whenever radio and TV gave exposure to a major party’s candidates. An exemption had been made in 1960 for the first televised presidential debates, between then-Sen. Kennedy and then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
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