With all the talk these past few weeks about the Fairness Doctrine and the latest debate on Broadband use for rural areas, I was reminded back when the FCC actually meant something - an agency whose job it was to protect the interest of the American People and the airwaves from the lunatic fringe, the special interests and the misguided. Listening this morning to Morning Edition and an interview with former FCC economist Michael Katz, he managed to bring home in big bright letters the concept of what we have lost over these years of deregulation, incompetence and ignorant hubris, I thought back when Newton Minow spoke to a gathering of National Association of Broadcasters in May 9, 1961.

I'm wondering if it's too late . . . . .

Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.

Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the television age. And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today's world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind's benefit, so will history decide whether today's broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or to debase them.

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