Excerpt from an address to the National Association of Broadcasters, May 9, 1961
Originally published in Equal Time: The Private Broadcaster and the Public Interest. New York: Atheneum, 1964.
Reprinted from Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment, 1995.

"When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse."

When John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, he brought to American politics a renewed sense of idealism and commitment to public service. "Ask not what your country can do for you," he proclaimed to the American public at his inauguration in 1961, "ask what you can do for your country." Kennedy, like most American politicians at the time, believed that America was in a race with the Soviet Union to establish dominance...