Sitting high above the Loop with Newton Minow, I realized that history buried his lede--to his everlasting good fortune.

"Burying the lede" is newspaperese for sticking a story's main point too far down. It partly explains why Monday brings the 50th anniversary of a speech that is now part of the cultural lexicon: "A vast wasteland."

That’s how he referred to television on May 9, 1961, in his first address as chairman of President John F. Kennedy's Federal Communications Commission. One can't imagine regulatory chiefs or cabinet officers today speaking so harshly, and forthrightly, to an industry they oversee.

The real message that Mr. Minow, then a 35-year-old Chicago lawyer, wanted to impart was that in exchange for free and exclusive licenses to use the airwaves, bona fide "public service" programming should be provided by broadcasters, whom he addressed and angered at their national gathering in Washington. "Vast wasteland" was a parenthetical term.

While Beck and his ilk want to portray diversity and localism as a dangerous conspiracy to censor, the fact remains that these ideas have been staples of communications policy since the beginning. The central mandate of the Federal Communications Commission--as enshrined in the Communications Act of 1934--is to promote localism, diversity and competition in the media. This same principle of localism has been a rallying cry for several generations of true conservatives.

Broadcasters get hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of subsidies and the right to use our airwaves in exchange for a basic commitment to be responsive to the interests of local communities.

Moreover, the Supreme Court recognized that "safeguarding the public's right to receive a diversity of views and information over the airwaves is ... an integral component of the FCC's mission."

Sadly, the FCC has failed to live up to this standard.

"What mainstream media's fear-merchants are most afraid of," writes Karr, "is not censorship, but an FCC that actually does its job--creating more opportunities for people like you and me to participate in media."

See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "The Great Spectrum Giveaway" (10/95) by Jim Naureckas.

The media advocacy group's Ben Scott further calls it

regrettable that the court tossed out an important public interest protection against excessive media consolidation. Congressional intent in the Cable Act of 1992 is very clear--the goals of federal policy in the cable industry are to promote competition, consumer choice and a diversity of programming. And yet today we have a cable cartel--the video industry is dominated by only a handful of large cable operators and studios.

Today consumers experience perpetual price hikes by large operators that already have market dominating purchasing power to decide the fate of new channels. The promises of lower prices through competition from satellite and telecom companies in the video business have never been realized.

While today "the court ruled the FCC's action as 'arbitrary and capricious,'" Free Press reminds us of how "the same court threw out the rule in 2001, but it was reinstated by the FCC in 2008 due to fears of growing market power of big cable companies."

approved unanimously a resolution urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to conduct a comprehensive investigation on hate speech in media, allowing public participation via public hearings, and for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to update its 1993 report the "Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes."

The Supervisors responded to grassroots activists in the Bay Area who have organized to call attention to the alarming increase of patently false and hateful language in media. For the last three years, the Hispanic/Latino Anti-Defamation Coalition SF has organized annual protests held at Clear Channel Communications.

Clear Channel is specifically "selected as the protest site due to the corporation's record of promoting some of the most virulent purveyors of hate and intolerance, including Michael Savage and Glenn Beck, who denigrate communities, groups and individuals."

Read the resolution on the City of San Francisco's website.

Also check out the profiles of Savage, Beck and other media hatemongers on FAIR's Smearcasting.com site--and see FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Hate Speech, Media Activism and the First Amendment: Putting a Spotlight on Dehumanizing Language" (5/09) by Candice O'Grady.