Word: minow
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...year after he told the National Association of Broadcasters that they were the overlords of a "vast wasteland," FCC Chairman Newton Minow stood before the same group in Chicago last week. "My speech last year ran about 6,000 words," he said. "Only two of those words seem to have survived. All of you know the two words I mean-public interest" The broadcasters chuckled manfully...
...Minow could justifiably take credit that his campaign against shoddy, dollar-grubbing television programming had forced the TV industry to think a little more about its responsibility to its audience. News and special-events directors, long abused in the board rooms for costing money without bringing more in, could thank him for the new prestige and new power they enjoy within their companies. Though he has to make do with rhetoric when he cannot compel reform, Minow, 36, a onetime law partner of Adlai Stevenson, has exercised greater influence over broadcasting than the FCC has ever shown before...
Cleared Chaos. This time Minow turned his attention to radio, a field too barren to be called a wasteland. There are more than three times as many radio stations now, he pointed out, as there were at the end of World War II; but most of them are run on the cheap, and the net result has amounted to air pollution. "In too many communities," said Minow, "to twist the radio dial today is to be shoved through a bazaar, a clamorous casbah of pitchmen and commercials which plead, bleat, pressure, whistle, groan and shout. Too many stations have turned...
Picture Window. Punctuating his message with such quotable slogans as "Man does not live by ratings alone" and "Public trusts are not to be sold like sacks of potatoes," Minow also reviewed the commission's accomplishments in TV during his tenure. The FCC has set up an education branch to help the growth of educational TV. It is pushing for dozens of new channels in the ultra-high frequencies to open up competition and hopefully lift the general quality of commercial television. Experiments in pay TV have been both condoned and conducted. Some 14 stations have been...
...hapless broadcasters seemed to take it all in with respect if not with enthusiasm. And when Minow's speech turned into a Ciceronian cannonade at the end, they at least knew from a year's experience that it might prove more than mere oratory. "We have much to learn from the great American audience," he told broad casters. "Television spends a great deal of time and effort measuring that audience. While this has been going on, the audience has been taking the measure of tele vision - and I think the audience is ahead of you . . . For the nation...