American Archive of Public Broadcasting

Thanks to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting for this tribute.

Like many Americans, we sadly mourn the loss of Newton Minow, FCC Chairman under President Kennedy and former Chairman of PBS, who died this past Saturday at age 97. We greatly cherish his memory and are thankful for our connection with him. When the Library of Congress and GBH took over AAPB from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2013, we asked Newt to join our Executive Advisory Council, and he graciously accepted. To have someone whose vision and work was so foundational for putting public broadcasting in America on a solid institutional footing, to have such a founding father give us guidance to help establish AAPB on a sound path forward to become a sustainable archival public institution was, to say the least, inspiring. Newt, in his clear and persuasive way, always promoted broadcasting in the public interest not only as an idea, but as a reality. As we do our work at AAPB to ensure that past programming produced by public broadcasting survives to benefit present and future generations, we look to Newt as our North Star.

In 2017, we invited Newt to the Library of Congress to help us celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Because of his advanced age, he instead recorded a video to begin and end the proceedings. In the opening video, he related the origins of his concern about broadcasting in the public interest. He recalled that in 1956, his friend Robert Kennedy had shared his thoughts on the growing importance of television in American life: “’When I grew up,’ Bob said, ‘I thought there were three great influences on a child: the home, the school, and the church…. I realize now raising my own children, there’s a fourth and it’s television…. My kids are watching television, they’re fascinated by television. Can’t we do something to improve it? Make it more educational and informative for kids.’” In the closing video, Newt told an incredible story of his role in fostering the creation of Sesame Street. You can find the video of that event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHsceZqsH2M&t=1549s. 

A few years ago, to honor Newt, AAPB put together a collection of programs featuring interviews with him, panels he was on, addresses he gave, and profiles of him. The collection includes a discussion he participated in about the future of television on the WGBH show Prospects of Mankind with Eleanor Roosevelt and a 1962 address he gave to a convention of the National Association of Broadcasting. His daughter Mary wrote us, “We got a special kick out of the audio of Dad’s return to the National Association of Broadcasting one year after his scathing ‘vast wasteland’ speech that told broadcasters in no uncertain terms that the FCC was there to serve the public, not the broadcasters. It was quite surprising to hear the way the broadcasters received him! I was in awe.”

Mary, a Presidential Appointee to the National Museum and Library Services Board at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, is now a member of our Executive Advisory Council. Two years ago, she and her father recorded an interview for AAPB’s podcast, “Presenting the Past” in which, at Mary’s prodding, he recounted a fascinating story of tracking down the man responsible for writing the “public interest” regulatory standard into the Communications Act of 1934.    

We are grateful to have had Newt and Mary as advisors, both of whom have contributed so much to the public interest.

–Alan Gevinson, Karen Cariani, Rachel Curtis, and Casey Davis