Medill School of Journalism

Newton Minow, John Bartlow Martin, and the “Vast Wasteland.”

By buckeyemuse | May 10, 2014

On this date—May 9—in 1961, Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, issued his famous description of television as “a vast wasteland.” It turns out that the famous words were the edited version of a phrase created by journalist and JFK speechwriter John Bartlow Martin, a Hamilton, Ohio native who spent most of his…

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