Newton Minow dies at 97.You might not recognize the name—except perhaps as the inspiration for the
S.S. Minnow on Gilligan's Island, named as an insult to him—but for a time in the early 1960s, Minow, the head of the FCC under President John F. Kennedy, was the most notorious name in television, despite never being directly involved in the industry.
In May 1961, at the end of the previous television season, Minow delivered his most famous speech, "Television and the Public Interest," in which he effectively declared the Golden Age of influential 1950s teleplays and cultural content dead and ripped the networks for producing a new wave of popular, but lowbrow, content, which he dubbed "a vast wasteland," an epithet that would stick with TV for many years after. To Minow, cartoons, sitcoms, action series and Westerns were beneath the dignity of the TV medium, which should have focused on documentaries and educational content. Minow believed, somewhat naïvely, that if television choices were expanded with highbrow choices, viewers would naturally gravitate toward that content and leave the lowbrow stuff in the dust.
That turned out not to be the case. Though some effort was made to placate Minow with more documentary content the following few seasons, by the mid-1960s it had become evident that lowbrow television had won out and that the genres Minow detested were still the most popular on TV. Minow supported the expansion of what we now know as public television, and was pleased when PBS was founded in 1970 as an outlet for the kind of content Minow had favored. Reflecting in 2011, he noted that the far greater expansion of TV options over the subsequent decades had improved quality, though it had eliminated the shared experience television had developed when there were limited options.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/06/1174552038/fcc-newton-minow-deadMinow's 1961 speech "Television and the Public Interest."
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm
