Newton Minow

Minow with an Elmo walk-around at a WTTW/WFMT event

The Count disagrees with Newton Minow
(the captioning corrects The Count's Transylvanian linguistic quirk with his Vs and Ws)

Newton Minow (1926-2023) was the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, best known for his 1961 speech criticizing commercial television as "a vast wasteland." In ensuing decades, the phrase has continued to be used and entered common parlance in reference to TV.

Despite his famous critique, Minow felt the medium could be used to further public interest and in particular called for reforms and improvements in children's television. While he left the FCC in 1963, he went on to become involved in public television.

Minow was interviewed in 2021 by Washington, D.C.-based WETA (one of the earliest public television stations, originally under NET before the transition to PBS). He recalled granting the station the license for its own channel, and spoke favorably of what came out of it:

“And what I envisioned has — my dream has been fulfilled. When I see the programs like the NewsHour, when I see what Ken Burns has created, when I see Sesame Street, I say, this is what I hoped would happen, and we more than fulfilled my dream.”
—PBS NewsHour interview. May 07, 2021

References

• Sinbad reads a story from Big Bird's book in Sesame Street Episode 3266, which begins "in the vast wasteland known as Hollywood."

• After the Count watches "Six Feet Under" in a segment (First: Episode 4062), he channel hops over various other shows with numbers in the titles, pleased by his choices. He declares, "Ah, wast vasteland my foot!"