Fifty years ago, then Chair of the Federal Communications Commission Newton Minow appeared before the National Association of Broadcasters and gave what remains the most significant speech about electronic media in American history. In it, Minow excoriated the broadcasting industry.

"When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better," he began. "But when television is bad," he warned, "nothing is worse."

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

Sitting there, viewers would see a "a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons."

Like so many media reformers, Minow strikes me as reluctant to acknowledge an obvious difference between 1961 and 2011. TV is not a vast wasteland anymore. It’s a crazy, weed-filled, wonderful, out-of-control garden."True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy," the FCC's boss conceded. "But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it."

In the latest edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Minow thoughtfully looks back on that moment in a piece titled A Vaster Wasteland.

"I knew broadcasters would not be happy," he winks, taking wicked pleasure in the response of Hollywood producer Sherwood Schwartz, who named the sinking vessel in his hit TV series Gilligan's Island "The Minnow."

The "vast wasteland" phrase represented "a metaphor for a particular time in our nation's communications history," Minow notes, "and to my surprise it became part of the American lexicon. It has come to identify me."

Minow also takes credit for some of the FCC's achievements in the 1960s, most notably breakthroughs in communication satellite technology and the rise of public broadcasting. "But our failures were equally dramatic, particularly in using television to serve our children and to improve our politics," he writes.

For fifty years, we have bombarded our children with commercials disguised as programs and with endless displays of violence and sexual exploitation. We are nearly alone in the democratic world in not providing our candidates with public-service television time. Instead we make them buy it—and so money consumes and corrupts our political discourse.

I agree with almost all the recommendations that Minow makes in the essay — including extending free TV airtime to presidential candidates and his oblique support for the FCC's open Internet rules. But I've lived through the last 50 years of TV history, too. And like so many media reformers, Minow strikes me as reluctant to acknowledge an obvious difference between 1961 and 2011. Television is not a vast wasteland anymore. It's a crazy, weed-filled, wonderful, out-of-control garden.

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The irony of Minow’s immortal phrase is that the landscape to which he referred wasn’t very vast compared with today. In any given major market, there were maybe seven stations.OK — I may be biased about this. Here's a confession. I love TV, and always have. Several years after Minow left the FCC, I was watching Gilligan's Island in the living room of my family's apartment in New York City. I was 13. My father, an electrical engineer, came home from work that day and proclaimed that I spent too much time in front of the set, which was true.

So he pulled an essential vacuum tube out of our old black-and-white clunker, and announced that he would reinstall the component only when he thought it appropriate.

The next afternoon, I unscrewed the back of TV again, read the inside schematic, and identified the manufacturer ID number of the missing tube. Down to the corner appliance repair store I went with my allowance money, purchased a new piece of hardware, reinstalled the device, and was happily keeping up with Skipper, the Professor, and Mary Ann within minutes.

Nobody got in the way of me and my shows.

But even then I knew that most television was pretty low grade (including Gilligan). I sensed this by how excited the adults in my life got when something good actually appeared on TV — Paddy Chayefsky's teleplay Marty or the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show or New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, or even a searing documentary like Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame. Minow was spot on when he said that nothing was better than these offerings, which were so frustratingly rare.

The irony of Minow's immortal phrase is that the landscape to which he referred wasn't very vast compared with today. In any given major market, such as New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, TV usually consisted of three network outlets, three locally owned stations, and a chronically underfunded nonprofit venue, which didn't get any PBS support until 1970.

As tedious as the network fare often was, the locally owned stations were worse. They were jokes — their best efforts focused on children's programming, followed by "professional wrestling," old movie reruns, and talk shows hosted by local lunatics — the clearest link between then and now.

And your regional "public" TV station invariably front-loaded itself with World War II documentaries. They were endless. If Adolf Hitler had shown up during a public TV pledge drive segment in 1966 asking for viewer support, I'm not sure that I would have been surprised.

But if you had told me back then that television would morph into what it is now, I would have accused you of imbibing one of the more noted controlled substances associated with that era.

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A lot of digital water has gone under the bridge since I illicitly repaired my dad's vacuum tube TV set. Not long ago I pulled a hockey puck sized device called the Apple TV out of a box, hooked it from our broadband router to our Sony Bravia HDTV, and put Apple video, Netflix, and YouTube at our household's online disposal.

This means that I can sit in my living room as I did last night and watch a dazzling performance by the concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa. I can listen to a rendition of Dimitri Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Minsk. I can instantly access a wide range of great documentaries on everything from the history of Catalonia to how to get a human safely to Mars. And any time I like I can enjoy one of my favorite independently produced animated films: Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues. All that plus all the movies I can stand.

Then there is the fare that I can get on our pay TV account—the endless procession of terrific programs produced by studios that know how competitive this environment has become: The Wire, Justified, Dexter, and Mad Men, to name only a few, or public affairs shows like Fareed Zakaria's GPS, The Daily Show, and Democracy Now on LinkTV. Occasionally even the networks offer something notable, such as The Good Wife.

Does this cornucopia include tons of mediocre junk? Sure. But I often experience it as enjoyable, because I know that it isn’t all there is. Finally, there's my Droid X, upon which I followed the Egypt crisis by watching streaming Al Jazeera. And because I teach a course on the regulation of the Internet at a nearby college, my students share YouTube videos with me on their mobiles, most recently Simon Tolfield's charming Simon's Cat anthology.

Does this cornucopia include tons of mediocre junk? Sure. But I often experience it as enjoyable, because I know that it isn't all there is. I belabor the positivity here because I so rarely see it noted — to call the present media environment a "vaster wasteland" is to miss the extraordinary nature of what we have built.

As the media landscape has changed, so has media reform. In the mid-twentieth century, the challenge for reformers was to democratically manage media scarcity — allowing ordinary citizens to talk back to their small array of local TV and radio stations through content managing tools like the Fairness Doctrine.

But those days are long gone, and those kind of content-based regulations have been appropriately discarded. Even Minow has called for their abandonment, several years ago joining with another former FCC Chair in condemning the agency's indecency rules as a "Victorian crusade."

Now the challenge is to protect and further media abundance. Minow alludes to this in his commentary.

"Our first [goal] must be to expand freedom, in order to strengthen editorial independence in news and information," he writes. "Freedom of thought is the foundation of our national character, and at its best the Internet represents the full flowering of that freedom. The Internet itself is the result of an open system that has encouraged technological innovation and creative energy we could never have dreamed of."

The essay praises the Commission's current boss, Julius Genachowski, for "leading public-interest advocates and industry groups to both meet the practical needs and uphold the democratic values at stake." But this generation's tasks are very different from those of the past. Television wasn't an open system in 1961. The Internet is. It needs to be defended from throttling, unfair prioritizing, data capping, metering, and media merging. And it needs to be given a chance to compete on an even playing field with broadcast TV and cable.

In short, the 'Net needs to be protected from being turned back into what television was when Newton Minow made his "vast wasteland" speech.

The former FCC chief concludes his commentary with an interesting anecdote:

As we think about the next 50 years, I remember a story President Kennedy told a week before he was killed. The story was about French Marshal Louis-Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey, who walked one morning through his garden with his gardener. He stopped at a certain point and asked the gardener to plant a tree there the next morning. The gardener said, 'But the tree will not bloom for 100 years.' The marshal replied, 'In that case, you had better plant it this afternoon.'

From my vantage point, the tree of which Lyautey spoke wasn't planted this afternoon. It was planted 50 years ago, when the first frameworks for the Internet were proposed in the United States and United Kingdom. Those seeds bloomed into a garden, not a "vaster wasteland."

That garden needs to be defended and expanded. But first take the time to appreciate its vast beauty.

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