‘The air is now completely filled with cowboys, fertilizers and inanity,” Groucho Marx growled in 1959. “The country is full of jerks, and they’re now getting exactly what they deserve.” Two years later, Newton Minnow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, agreed that television was “a vast wasteland.” Network executives, he claimed, were bottom-line businessmen who reached for the largest – and lowest – common denominator.
Office of Strategic Communication