"Mr. Minow and the Broadcast Industry"
Proposal of new economic regulatory policies to require television stations to diversify their programming, in response to FCC Commissioner Newton Minow's call for greater media diversity / Date: January 26, 1962 (WBAI-FM Radio: New York)
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Story behind the song
(Behind the sound clip)
In January 1962, President Kennedy's Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow was pushing for revolutionary, equitable diversification of the airwaves.
Levin expanded on it in his capacity as an economist before the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, in its Antitrust Subcommittee's hearings on concentration of ownership in media.
And in a peak-time broadcast on WBAI-FM (New York) Radio's "Commentator Series", he presented a bold new proposal for requiring broadcast owners to diversify their programming.
BAI was an independent non-commercial, audience-supported station just two years old then.
The speeches proved to be ahead of their time by about forty years. Congress was skeptical, the radio audience curious but somewhat oblivious.
Among the first to address the issue, Levin's comments essentially provided a blueprint of his lifelong crusade as an economist.
After years of dismissal, those controversial and initially unpopular policies were implemented three decades later with the FCC's auctioning of broadcast frequencies. It culminated in Congress's passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, seeking to promote diversity in both programming and the viewpoints expressed.
As one journalist observed, it only took a generation.
"I've had many opportunities to be 'bruised'. And I'm pleased to be bruised. Sometimes I even hear nice things like, 'If you keep doing this for another thirty years, you might get through.' And my answer is, I don't have a particular time horizon. I'm rather optimistic. I think we're moving, though it might be in a very slow way."
- Harvey J. Levin
