News and Entertainment in the Digital Age: A Vast Wasteland Revisited

In 1961, FCC Chairman Newt Minow famously described television as a “vast wasteland” and called for new public interest programming. Fifty years later, Minow gathered at Harvard with others including Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, Nieman Foundation Curator Ann Marie Lipinski (NF ’90), Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg View, and Harvard Law School’s Yochai Benkler, Terry Fisher, John Palfrey, and Jonathan Zittrain to reflect on the changed nature of television and the dramatic shifts that have shaped the media landscape in the past five decades.