My Dad and Television’s “Vast Wasteland”

Posted on May 9, 2013 at 9:00 am

52 years ago today my dad, the new 35-year-old Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission appointed by President John F. Kennedy, made a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters that was on every list of the most influential speeches of the 2oth century. We are very proud of him.

At that time, network news on television was pretty much limited to 15 minutes once a day. Children’s programming was local and had very little educational component.

Here’s a look at some of what was on the air back then:

And here’s what dad had to say as an update.

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Free Ebook on the Presidential Debates

Posted on October 3, 2012 at 3:55 pm

This week, as we prepare for President Obama and Governor Romney to have the first of their three scheduled debates, the University of Chicago is making available an ebook about the history of the debates written by my dad, Newton Minow, and his colleague Craig LaMay.

Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future offers readers for the first time a genuinely inside look into the origins of the presidential debates and the many battles—both legal and personal—that have determined who has been allowed to debate and under what circumstances. The authors do not dismiss the criticism of the presidential debates in recent years but argue that they are one of the great accomplishments of modern American electoral politics. As they remind us, the debates were once unique in the democratic world, are now emulated across the globe, and they offer the public the only real chance to see the candidates speak in direct response to one another in a discussion of major social, economic, and foreign policy issues.

I also recommend Dad’s interview about the debates (a free copy of my new ebook to the first person to spot me in the background) and his wise words in an op-ed in the New York Times.

Sadly, the marriage of television and politics in our country has been mostly a history of disappointment. In 1952, television stations — which are licensed by the F.C.C. to serve the public interest — began selling commercials to political campaigns. Other democracies have rejected this idea, and instead provide public service time to candidates during campaign periods. Over the next 60 years, more and more political commercials flooded the airwaves, forcing candidates to raise more and more money. Many of the slurs and slogans in these commercials — which are often fact-free and misleading — are now paid for by “super PACs” financed by secret donors. I believe it is unconscionable that candidates for public office have to buy access to the airwaves — which the public itself owns — to talk to the public.

The debates are one of the few features of our political campaigns that are still admired throughout the world. Candidate debates are still new in most democratic countries, even in Western Europe. Britain, often held up as a model for how to hold a proper election, only in 2010 began to have televised live debates among the party leaders vying to be prime minister.

Let me suggest that after you watch the debate on Wednesday night, you turn off your television set and do your best to avoid the spin that will follow. Talk about what you saw and heard with your family, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers. You are smarter than the spinners. It’s your decision that matters on Nov. 6, not theirs.

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A Tribute to My Dad and his “Vast Wasteland” Speech

Posted on May 9, 2012 at 9:58 am

51 years ago today my dad, the new 35-year-old Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission appointed by President John F. Kennedy, made a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters that was on every list of the most influential speeches of the 2oth century. We are very proud of him.

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Television

“The Best Man” and My Dad’s Un-Conventional Idea

Posted on March 29, 2012 at 2:51 pm

I’m very proud of my dad’s piece in Politico today about the advantages of a brokered convention.

I’ve been at a brokered convention and worked for a candidate who came out of it. Even though my candidate lost the general election, it was still a far more robust and constructive process than the primary-caucus marathon of the past half-century.

My dad, who has been involved in national, state, and local campaigns since 1948, says that

primary voters push GOP candidates to the right, and Democratic candidates left. Independent voters, who occupy the center, wonder why the parties nominate candidates who don’t represent their views. The nominees then spend the general election recanting what they said in the primaries, to persuade the independents, who decide elections.

We thought getting rid of the brokered conventions would do away with smoke-filled rooms and backroom deals. We just substituted one set of bosses for another.

I also read today that a new production of Gore Vidal’s play, “The Best Man” is about to open on Broadway with an all-star cast that includes “Will and Grace” star Eric McCormack, Candace Bergan, James Earl Jones, Angela Lansbury, and, in a small role, Donna Hanover, who knows something about politics as the former wife of the mayor of New York City. Vidal, whose political expertise was in part based on his being related to Jaqueline Kennedy, penned a sharp story about two Presidential candidates at a brokered convention along the lines of the ones my dad wrote about. The movie version, starring Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson, is one of my all-time favorite political dramas and as timely as the day it was written.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbJoI6yToc4

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For Your Netflix Queue Neglected gem

My Dad at Harvard

Posted on September 15, 2011 at 3:54 pm

My wonderful dad, Newton Minow, was honored at Harvard this week for half a century of public service in working to make the greatest amount of choice and the broadest range of media resources available. He talked about the five decades that have taken us from three networks with 15 minutes a day of national news programming operating under the “fairness doctrine” to the plugged-in, omni-media world we live in now. As we commemorate the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, remember that they occurred before YouTube and Twitter. He reminded the audience that the debates about media have evolved but the issues remain:

“Television had become the dominant form of communication in our country, but there had been very little discussion about what that meant in terms of public responsibility and public interest. I was determined to start that discussion, even though I knew my speech would not be well-received,” he said, adding that his speech prompted Gilligan’s Island executive producer Sherwood Schwartz to name the ship that ran aground “the S.S. Minnow.”

Minow believes that the problems that plagued television and communication 50 years ago are still present today. He said that the discussion of public responsibility that was missing then is still neglected now….

“When President Kennedy gave his Cuban Missile Crisis speech, there were no pundits on after he gave it. They cut back to regular programming, so the public could absorb it,” she said. “I don’t know what we do about the fact that we need the public to push the country to social and political change, and leadership needs that relationship to get the public engaged, but the media has made that difficult.”

A webcast of the event, which featured Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg and Anne Marie Lipinski (formerly editor of the Chicago Tribune) is on Harvard’s site. Now he is in Washington, D.C., where he will go to the White House for the kick-off of one of his most recent and most important projects, the Digital Promise (now called the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies).

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Television