7 - The Vast Wasteland

Summary

Chapter 7 examines the mindset of Newton Minow, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman who summed up the regulator’s view of television by calling it a “vast wasteland.” Minow championed public interest regulation of the broadcast medium based on the theory that the electromagnetic spectrum is scarce and that the government must allocate broadcast licenses and regulate the content of programming.But the spectrum is no more scarce than any other economic good, and the events that led to federal control over broadcasting were contrived to extend government control over the medium. Minow and other like-minded regulators deny that this type of control is censorship, but their efforts caused diminished diversity in programming and dampened innovation. Further, the tenets of broadcast regulation were undermined as new technologies emerged, although that fact did not deter Minow and other like-minded regulators from advocating more government control. Since then, the law and the culture have moved on, rendering the positions that Minow espoused obsolete.