MAKING TELEVISION SAFE FOR KIDS

In 1961, shortly after President John F. Kennedy appointed me chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, I told the nation's broadcasters, the people who in those days ran the television business, that they had made television into a "vast wasteland."

Almost overnight those two words became television's first enduring sound bite. For decades, they have been used, over and over and over again, to describe what Americans find when they come home after work in the evenings and turn on their television sets, what our children find there after school or on Saturday morning. "Vast wasteland" appears in newspaper headlines, in...