[This is an excerpt from my 1995 Yale Law Journal article "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do," written for a symposium called "Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I'd serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]
"[T]hough the perceived defects of [television] are many … they can be more or less subsumed in two words: vast wasteland." Newton Minow, then chairman of the FCC, coined this pejorative in 1961, and it has (justly) stuck.
But if your local bookstore let you buy, at any given hour, only five books—each chosen for maximum appeal to 250 million people—you'd think of publishing as a vast wasteland, too. This would be true even if the store had fifty books, or maybe even 500 books to match the touted 500-channel cable system of the future. There'd be a greater chance that you'd get what you want, but still you'd often be dissatisfied.
