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CHICAGO (AP) — Newton N. Minow, who as Federal Communications Fee chief within the early Sixties famously proclaimed that community tv was a “huge wasteland,” died Saturday. He was 97.
Minow, who obtained a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, died Saturday at house, surrounded by family members, mentioned his daughter, Nell Minow.
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“He wished to be at house,” she advised The Related Press. “He had a superb life.”
Although Minow remained within the FCC submit simply two years, he left a everlasting stamp on the broadcasting trade by means of authorities steps to foster satellite tv for pc communications, the passage of a regulation mandating UHF reception on TV units and his outspoken advocacy for high quality in tv.
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“My religion is within the perception that this nation wants and may help many voices of tv — and that the extra voices we hear, the higher, the richer, the freer we will be,” Minow as soon as mentioned. “In spite of everything, the airways belong to the folks.”
Minow was appointed as FCC chief by President John F. Kennedy in early 1961. He had initially come to know the Kennedys within the Nineteen Fifties as an aide to Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956.
Minow laid down his well-known problem to TV executives on Might 9, 1961, in a speech to the Nationwide Affiliation of Broadcasters, urging them to take a seat down and watch their station for a full day, “and not using a ebook, journal, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or ranking ebook to distract you.”
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“I can guarantee you that you’ll observe an unlimited wasteland,” he advised them. “You will note a procession of sport reveals, method comedies about completely unbelievable households, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, homicide, Western unhealthy males, Western good males, personal eyes, gangsters, extra violence and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling and offending.”
As he spoke, the three networks had been nearly all most viewers had to select from. Pay tv was barely within the strategy planning stage, PBS and “Sesame Avenue” had been a number of years away, and HBO and area of interest channels reminiscent of Animal Planet had been far sooner or later.
The speech prompted a sensation. “Huge wasteland” turned a catch phrase. Jimmy Durante opened an NBC particular by saying, “Da subsequent hour might be devoted to upliftin’ da high quality of tv. … No less than, Newt, we’re tryin’.”
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Minow turned the primary authorities official to get a George Foster Peabody award for excellence in broadcasting. The New York Instances critic Jack Gould (himself a Peabody winner) wrote, “In the end there’s a man in Washington who proposes to champion the pursuits of the general public in TV issues and isn’t timid about ruffling the trade’s most august feathers. Tonight some broadcasters had been looking for darkish explanations for Mr. Minow’s perspective. On this matter the viewer presumably could be a little useful; Mr. Minow has been watching tv.”
CBS President Frank Stanton strongly disagreed, calling Minow’s feedback a “sensationalized and oversimplified strategy” that might result in ill-advised reforms “on the bottom that any change is a change for the higher.”
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For the criticism over his speech, Minow mentioned he didn’t help censorship, preferring exhortation and measures to broaden public selections. However he additionally mentioned a broadcasting license was “an unlimited present” from the federal government that introduced with it a duty to the general public.
His daughter, Nell Minow, advised The Related Press in 2011 that her father beloved tv and wished he would have been remembered for championing the general public curiosity in tv programming, relatively than just some phrases in his a lot broader speech.
“His No. 1 aim was to offer folks selection,” she mentioned.
Among the many new legal guidelines throughout his tenure had been the All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962, that required that TV units decide up UHF in addition to VHF broadcasts, which opened up TV channels numbered above 13 for widespread viewing. Congress additionally handed a invoice that offered funds for instructional tv, and measures to foster communications satellites.
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In a September 2006 interview on Nationwide Public Radio, Minow recalled telling Kennedy that such satellites had been “extra necessary than sending a person into house. … Communications satellites will ship concepts into house, and concepts dwell longer than folks.” On July 10, 1962, Minow was one of many officers making statements on the primary dwell trans-Atlantic tv program, an indication of AT&T’s Telstar satellite tv for pc.
Youngsters’s programming was a selected curiosity of Minow, a father of three, who advised broadcasters the few good youngsters’s reveals had been “drowned out within the huge doses of cartoons, violence and extra violence. … Search your consciences and see should you can not provide extra to your younger beneficiaries whose future you information so many hours each day.”
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Minow resigned in Might 1963 to turn out to be government vp and common counsel for Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. in Chicago.
Nell Minow mentioned her father additionally was instrumental in getting presidential debates televised, beginning with Kennedy and Richard N. Nixon, after watching Stevenson battle to make use of the brand new medium throughout his 1956 presidential run.
“Minow was appalled by … the entire charade of getting to image-make on tv,” mentioned Craig Allen, a mass communications professor at Arizona State College who wrote a 2001 ebook about Minow.
In 1965, Minow returned to his regulation apply in Chicago, and later served as board member at PBS, CBS Inc. and the promoting firm Foote Cone & Belding Communications Inc. He was director of the Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Coverage Research of Northwestern College.
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He additionally gave Barack Obama a summer time job on the regulation agency, the place the longer term president met his spouse, Michelle Robinson. Minow additionally was one in all Obama’s earliest supporters when the then-Illinois senator thought of working for president, Nell Minow mentioned.
Tv is one in all our century’s most necessary advances “and but, as a nation, we pay no consideration to it,” Minow mentioned in a 1991 Related Press interview.
He continued to push for reforms reminiscent of free airtime for political advertisements and extra high quality programming whereas additionally praising advances in variety in U.S. tv.
“In 1961, I fearful that my youngsters wouldn’t profit a lot from tv. However in 1991 I fear that my grandchildren will really be harmed by it,” he mentioned.
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Former Related Press author Polly Anderson in New York contributed to this story.
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