VAST WASTELAND.

Three days ago I started writing this piece to praise Oprah for her thoughtfulness and innovation. I quoted Newton Minnow, former head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) who said, and this was in 1960, that television was a “vast wasteland.”

After I had written all this I found room for adjustment – like the practice of not publishing the first thing you write, but “sleeping on it” before you let it out. Glad I did.

Minnow is still around. In fact he’s in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly, revisiting his old statement. He is still preaching about the obligation of broadcasters who have been given access to the public domain of the airwaves, and commenting about how much has happened in the intervening 50 years. Technology has changed. The internet now offers a wide range of choices, making the free press really free. The question of course may still be: is yesterday’s “wasteland” any worse than what we have today? Perhaps the TV of the 50s and 60s with Howdy Doody and Milton Berle was a wasteland. Even with the likes of Sid Caesar and the “Show of Shows” or the live dramatic productions. it was mass media at its ugliest. Language like “Idiot Box” defined it. But while we deplored the rise of the pervasive new medium, we were also creating Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. In Canada we were daring the medium with “This Hour Has Seven Days.” It was not all bad at all.


The other intervening factor was that I had more time to check what “OWN” - the Oprah Winfrey Network, was up to. Many of my hopes and dreams vanished.

After the first exposure I was lyrical. Here’s what I wrote then.

If Minnow were around today to see the arrival of “reality” television, and of The Bachelor and Charlie Sheen, he would have a lot to say. But there has also been PBS and its attempts to bring culture and quality. For me, by and large, TV has become a place to watch the news, live baseball and hockey, sometimes a good movie, and once in a while a documentary. Lest I sound too snobbish, I can find myself wasting hours watching what can only be described as pure trash. And even some of the so-called trash once had pretension of quality. TLC (which most people still think stands for Tender Loving Care, actually was “The Learning Channel.” It was full of science and history. Today it is just another mass-market purveyor of schlock. Do you remember when a Winnipeg group of determined feminists applied for got the license to create a cable TV station that spoke to the needs of women? The “W” channel now subsists on an almost steady diet of “chick” flicks.

My first exposure to Oprah’s new network was a bright light. It was what could be, if not the re-invention of mass-market TV, at least an attempt to raise it above some of the trash. I believed that perhaps America’s richest woman had risked it all on the hope that she could bring more quality into the living rooms of North Americans. If “Master Class” was any example she is on her way. Of course we will have to put up with more Dr. Phil and a few other pop psych shows. But last night Saturday past) was a documentary about “Saturday Night Live,” or to put it more accurately, a documentary about the life of Lorne Michaels (nee Leibowitz – and I wondered why if Annie could keep the name why didn’t Lorne? I’m just carping.) Except for his remarkably inaccurate comment comparing the lack of political satire in his former country and about how Americans were not afraid of political satire. Lorne – you have been away too long. America has never produced the likes of Royal Air Farce. America, even with Tina Faye’s “take” on Sarah Plain, has not topped Luba Goy’s portrayal of The Queen, or Ferguson’s Stephen Harper. But that is another argument.

(Just a sidelight. In 1975 I interviewed Lorne on my talk show from L.A. He asked me what I thought about SNL. I told him I found it juvenile, collegiate. I was pretty pompous.)

Oprah herself cut into the show as a kind of M.C. The commercials did not overpower. I am guessing that she wants a stricter control over the amount and quality of commercials.

Following the hour with Lorne Michaels there was a show about two women who make cupcakes. Oh-oh I thought. He we go – back into the dreaded afternoon rubbish designed for the stay at home women by men who have no idea what the stay-at-home woman is really like. Turned out to be an interesting half hour as these two close friends negotiated for a space in a shopping mall while baby sitting her brother’s two squalling children. It promised nothing. It did not try to be a “reality” show. It just “was.” It was, if this is possible, an acceptable “fluff” piece.


Maybe Oprah will be able to put some quality back, and not with the usual striving toward a kind of elitism programming but being real.

Two days later and I am not so sure. The “network” is nothing more than an expansion of the Oprah Show. It seems that the daily hour has burst its own seams and needs more room. But more room for the same-old-same-old. The “feel good” pop psych stuff was back with a vengeance. Not just Dr. Phil, but a show about a woman looking for her birth mother. Then another show with a therapist dealing with a woman who hoarded everything that represented a memory of her family. There was a “real” whodunit about a murder in Hamilton. I needed more of this? More of the insecurity? More of the soul-baring angst? It was Oprah redux.

There is consolation. The only other person to make a late entry into TV is Rupert Murdoch. He has prospered. His product is abominable. Fox News is not news, it is Murdoch propaganda. To compare his lust for power to Oprah’s dedication to viewers, would be a mistake.

I may be hoping for the same brighter future I hoped for when cable TV told us there would be hundreds of new programs and more than enough quality. What happened was the big mainstream media companies took over cable, buying out struggling operators and imposing mediocrity (to make it sound better than it is) on all of us. Saddest reflection on this is that the media companies who made all those promises would come back a year later with hat-in-hand and ask for permission to make some changes because the station was losing money. Strange, the CRTC is supposed to examine the pro forma submitted with the application and make a decision based on economic viability. The schemes of the wealthy media moguls win every time.

But back to “OWN.” Having sunk millions into her latest venture, has Oprah finally over-stepped? She is not the same Oprah who arrived on the scene with what I remember as a radical feminist position and the ability to make women feel better about themselves. I seems to me that she has run out of ideas. I hope I am wrong.