Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Television Fraud The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals by Kent Anderson Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals by Kent Anderson. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #0dfa9e20-ce3c-11eb-b781-7deb85178a3d VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Wed, 16 Jun 2021 00:44:49 GMT. 1950s quiz show scandals. The American quiz show scandals of the 1950s were a series of revelations that contestants of several popular television quiz shows were secretly given assistance by the show's producers to arrange the outcome of an ostensibly fair competition. The quiz show scandals were driven by a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons included the drive for financial gain, the willingness of contestants to "play along" with the assistance, and the lack of current regulations prohibiting the rigging of game shows. [1] The $64,000 Question became the first big-money television quiz show during the 1950s, and the most publicized quiz scandals surrounded that program in addition to Twenty One and Dotto . [1] In 1956, the Jack Barry-hosted game show Twenty One featured a contestant, Herb Stempel, coached by producer Dan Enright to allow his opponent to win the game. The matter was brought into focus in 1958 when Enright was revealed to have rigged the show; this revelation caused networks to cancel their entire lineups of quiz shows. Charles Van Doren was another contestant on Twenty One who eventually came forth with revelations about how he was persuaded to accept specific answers during his time on the show. [2] These elements of the scandal were portrayed in the 1994 movie Quiz Show . As a result, many contestants' reputations were tarnished. In 1960, the United States Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit the fixing of quiz shows. As a result of that action, many networks canceled their existing quiz shows and replaced them with a higher number of public service programs. [2] Most networks also imposed a winnings limit on their existing and future game shows, which would eventually be removed by inflation and the rise of the million-dollar jackpot game shows starting in 1999. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Federal Communications Commission v. American Broadcasting Co., Inc. 347 U.S. 284, [3] that quiz shows were not a form of gambling; this paved the way for their introduction to television. The prizes of these new shows were unprecedented. Contents. Revelation. Herb Stempel was a contestant on Twenty One who was coached by the show's producer Dan Enright. While Stempel was in the midst of his winning streak, both of the $64,000 quiz shows were in the top-ten rated programs but Twenty One did not have the same popularity. Enright and his partner Albert Freedman were searching for a new champion to replace Stempel to boost ratings. They soon found what they were looking for in Charles Lincoln Van Doren. Charles Van Doren was an English teacher at Columbia University when a friend suggested he try out for a quiz show. Skeptical at first, Van Doren decided to try out for the quiz show Tic-Tac-Dough because of the possible money a contestant could win. Enright, who produced both Tic-Tac-Dough and Twenty One , saw Van Doren's tryout and was familiar with his prestigious family background that included multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and highly respected professors at Columbia University. As a result, Enright felt that Van Doren would be the perfect contestant to be the new face of Twenty One . [4] As part of their plan, the producers of Twenty One arranged the first Van Doren-Stempel face-off to end in three ties. This strategy paid off as millions of viewers tuned in the next week to watch. Although the manipulation of the contestants on Twenty One helped the producers maintain viewer interest and ratings, the producers had not anticipated the extent of Stempel's resentment at being required to lose the contest against Van Doren. [5] After achieving winnings of $69,500, Stempel's scripted loss to the more popular Van Doren occurred on 5 December 1956. One of the questions Stempel answered incorrectly involved the winner of the 1955 Academy Award for Best Motion Picture. (The correct answer was Marty , one of Stempel's favorite movies; as instructed by Enright, Stempel gave the incorrect answer On the Waterfront , winner of Best Picture the previous year.) After his preordained loss, Stempel spoke out [To whom?] against the operation, claiming that he deliberately lost the match against Van Doren on orders from Enright. Initially Stempel was dismissed as a sore loser, but in August 1958 some evidence came to light that bolstered his credibility. Ed Hilgemeyer, a contestant on Dotto , announced that he had found a notebook containing the very answers contestant Marie Winn was delivering on stage (the daytime and nighttime versions of the show were both cancelled on August 15, 1958). The final stroke, however, came from Twenty One contestant James Snodgrass, who was found to have sent registered letters to himself containing the advance answers. Such evidence was considered irrefutable. It eventually emerged that the September 12, 1956 debut of Twenty One had gone so badly that sponsor Geritol called producers Enright and Jack Barry the following day and demanded changes. Under pressure, Enright and Freedman decided to rig the show. Jack Barry, co-owner of Barry-Enright Productions and the show's host, was not involved in the actual rigging, but later helped in the cover-up. By October 1958, the story was widely known and the quiz shows' Nielsen ratings plunged. The networks denied any knowledge and canceled the now-suspicious shows. The American public's reactions were quick and powerful when the quiz show fraud became public: between 87% and 95% knew about the scandals as measured by industry-sponsored polls. [6] Meanwhile, New York prosecutor Joseph Stone convened a grand jury to investigate the charges. Many of the coached contestants, who had become celebrities due to their quiz-show success, were so afraid of the social repercussions that they were unwilling to confess to having been coached, even to the point of perjuring themselves to avoid backlash. The judge sealed the grand jury report for unknown reasons. The 86th United States Congress, by then in its first session, quickly saw the political opportunity the scandals offered; in October 1959, the House Committee on Legislative Oversight, under Representative Oren Harris's chairmanship, began to hold hearings investigating the scandal. Patty Duke, then a child actress who had competed on The $64,000 Challenge (a companion show to The $64,000 Question ), testified to having been coached, as did Stempel, Snodgrass and Hilgemeyer. The gravity of the scandal was confirmed on November 2 when Van Doren said to the Committee in a nationally-televised session that "I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception. The fact that I too was very much deceived cannot keep me from being the principal victim of that deception, because I was its principal symbol." Aftermath. Law and politics. The entire matter was called "a terrible thing to do to the American people" by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. [7] The rapid growth of television as a new technology in the 1950s occurred at such a rate that laws and prohibitions could not keep up. This medium was so new that people recognized neither its dangers nor its potential for manipulation. All of the regulations regarding television at that time were defined under The Federal Communications Act of 1934, which dealt with the advertising, fair competition, and labeling of broadcast stations. The Act and regulations written by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) were indefinite in regards to fixed television programs. Due to the fact that there were no specific laws regarding the fraudulent behavior in the quiz shows, it is debatable whether the producers or contestants alike did anything wrong. Instead, it could be inferred that the medium was ill-used. [5] After concluding the Harris Commission investigation, Congress passed a law prohibiting the fixing of quiz shows (and any other form of contest). [8] These public hearings triggered amendments passed to the Communications Act in 1960. Therefore, the bill that President Eisenhower signed into law on September 13, 1960, was a fairly mild improvement to the broadcast industry. It allowed the FCC to require license renewals of less than the legally required three years if the agency believes it would be in the public interest, prohibited gifts to FCC members, and declared illegal any contest or game with intent to deceive the audience. [5] However, at the time, while the actions may have been disreputable, they were not illegal. As a result, no one went to prison for rigging game shows. The individuals who were prosecuted were charged because of attempts to cover up their actions, either by obstruction of justice or perjury. Contestants. Many quiz show contestants' reputations were ruined. , who had become a regular on NBC's The Today Show , lost his job in the television industry. He was also forced to resign his professorship at Columbia University. Van Doren took a job as an editor at Encyclopædia Britannica earning about 20% of what he had been paid on The Today Show , and continued working as an editor and writer until his retirement in 1982. , the man Van Doren defeated on Twenty One , continued working for New York City, and considered the profession of the man who beat him which was a social studies teacher in the New York school system. Stempel has also lectured occasionally at various colleges about the quiz scandals. , whose notebook triggered Dotto' s exposure and demise, eventually became a journalist whose books include The Plug-In Drug , a scathing critique on television's influence over children. The book became somewhat controversial for its author having been circumspect about her role in one of the medium's greatest scandals. Hosts and producers. In September 1958, a New York grand jury called producers who had coached contestants to appear in testimony. It was later estimated by a prosecutor on the case that of the 150 sworn witnesses before the panel, only 50 told the truth. [6] Some producers included Jack Barry, Dan Enright and Frank Cooper. Barry and Enright's reputations suffered the most from the scandals as the result of the rigging of Twenty One . Barry was effectively blackballed from national television until 1969. Enright went to Canada to continue working in television, and was unable to get a job in American television until 1975. Although he went through a difficult five-year period (according to an interview with TV Guide before his death in 1984), Barry moved to Los Angeles, eventually finding work on local television. He would later admit in an article in TV Guide that, in order to determine if he still had a bad reputation (because of the requirement to have a license with the FCC), he raised money to buy a Redondo Beach radio station. Barry returned to hosting with The Generation Gap in 1969 and had success with The Joker's Wild , which premiered in 1972. Barry and Enright resumed their partnership full-time in 1976. Their production of game shows, notably the syndicated Tic-Tac-Dough (which Barry did not host) and Joker (which he did) in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in millions of dollars in revenue and, more importantly for both, forgiveness from the public for their involvement in the scandals. Indeed, Barry and Enright were able to sponsor the teen-sex comedy film Private Lessons , based on Dan Greenberg's novel Philly and starring Eric Brown alongside Sylvia Kristel and Howard Hesseman, using revenue from their renewed success. Other producers met the same fate as Barry and Enright, but were unable to redeem themselves afterwards. One of the more notable is Frank Cooper, whose Dotto ended up being his longest-running and most popular game. Hosts such as Jack Narz and Hal March continued to work on television after the scandals. March died in January 1970 from lung cancer. Narz, who passed a lie-detector test at the time of the Dotto affair, had an extensive career as a game show host after the incident (as did his brother Tom Kennedy), retiring in 1982; he died in October 2008 after suffering two massive strokes. Sonny Fox, the original host of The $64,000 Challenge , left that show long before it could become tainted and became a popular children's host in the northeast, remembered best as the suave, genial host of the Sunday morning learn-and-laugh marathon Wonderama . Fox's replacement, Ralph Story, went on to become a newscaster for KNXT-TV/KCBS-TV in Los Angeles. Television. The quiz show scandals exhibited the necessity for an even stronger network control over programming and production. Quiz show scandals also justified and accelerated the growth of the networks' power over television advertisers concerning licensing, scheduling and sponsorship of programs. The networks claimed to be ignorant and victims of the quiz show scandals. The NBC president at the time stated, "NBC was just as much a victim of the quiz show frauds as was the public." [10] Quiz shows virtually disappeared from prime time American television for decades. Those that continued to air had substantially reduced prizes, and many shows adopted limits on the number of games a player could win (usually five). Quiz shows became game shows, shifting focus from knowledge to puzzles and word games. NBC's comedy/game show Jackpot Bowling and ABC's more serious Make That Spare! were the only big-money game shows still on television after the fallout; as bowling is not a game that can easily be rigged for television, those shows continued to air into the early 1960s. A quiz for big money would not return until ABC premiered 100 Grand in 1963; it went off the air after three weeks. It would not be until the 1970s that five-figure prizes would again be offered on American television, and not until the 1980s that six-figure prizes could be won. Rigging in other countries. United Kingdom. In 1958, ITV pulled its version of Twenty One almost immediately after contestant Stanley Armstrong claimed that he had been given "definite leads" to the answers. This resulted in a placement of a permanent winnings cap of £6000, which was increased to £6400 when the British version of The $64,000 Question premiered in 1990. The winnings cap was permanently eliminated in 1994. Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals by Kent Anderson. THE PEOPLE OF THE BUFFALO: A SOCIO-CULTURAL ASSESSMENT OF INHOLDERS ALONG THE BUFFALO NATIONAL RIVER. by Kent Anderson page seven. Letters and Unpublished Materials. Adams, Covington, and Younes (law office). Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Roy Keeton, Sr., July 9, 1979. Ashley, Hugh. Public statement before Oversight Hearing, Hot Springs, Arkansas, September 16, 1977. Bramhall, W. E. Letter to Hilary Jones, August 25, 1977. Bumpers, Senator Dale. Letter to Kenneth Villines, September 4, 1979. Johansen, Rienhart, Letter to Hilary Jones, September 23, 1977. Martin, Tommy. Letter to Andrew Adams, July 16, 1979. McClellan, Senator John. Letter to State Rep. Sterlin Hurley, April 24, 1971. Minutes of Meeting of the Committee for Landowners' Rights of the Newton County Quorum Court, October, 1979. Teter, Rhonda, and Wilson, Ruth. (Eds.) Unpublished manuscript on the history and culture of Newton County, Arkansas. Turney, John. Letter to Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt, July 10, 1979. Villines, Howard. Letter to Senator Ted Stevens, August 8, 1979. Villines, Kenneth. Letter to Senator Dale Bumpers, August 27, 1979. Acquisition Ceiling Increases. Statutes at Large , Vol. XC (1972). Buffalo National River Act. Statutes at Large , Vol. LXXXVI 1976) U.S. Congress. House. Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt speaking in favor of the Buffalo National River. And Cong., 2nd sess., May 13, 1971. Congressional Record , CXVII, 14916-14917. Department of the Interior. National Park Service. Buffalo National River Final Master Plan . Prepared by the Denver National Park Office, 1977. Adams, Andrew. December 23, 1980. Ashley, Hugh. December 17, 1980, Brasel, Bill. December 16, 1980. Casey, Arvel. December 15, 1980. Chadbourn, Harmon. January 12 and 27, 1981. Clagett, Weldon. December 16, 1980. Clark, Bill and Charlene. December 15, 1980. Duty, Bill. December 15, 1980. Eaton, Marilyn, January 9, 1981. Hamilton, Oxford, December 16, 1980. Hannon, Lucille. December 16, 1980. Hedges, Harold. January 11, 1981. Hickman, Robert. December 16, 1980. Hubbard, Ken. December 17, 1980. Jones, Hilary. December 16-17, 1980. Keeton, Roy, Jr. December 15, 1980. Marshall, Howard and Vivian. December 17, 1980. Martin, Tommy. December 14, 1980 and January 10, 1981, Massey, Dewey. December 17, 1980. Park, Sam Hugh. January 9, 1981. Patterson, Jerry. December 17, 1980. Shaddox, Ted and Jimmie. December 18, 1980. Slay, Emmett and Katie. December 17, 1980. Teter, Hap and Rhonda, December 14-17, 1980. Tudor, Ed. December 17, 1980. Van Deven, Herb. December 18, 1980. Villines, Conrad. December 17, 1980. Villines, Howard. December 15, 1980, Villines, Kenneth. December 15, 1980. Villines, Paul. December 15, 1980, Villines, Waymon and Norma Lee. December 14, 1980. Watkins, Ray. December 16, 1980. Weaver, Rhona. January 8, 1931. Wilkins, Neil. December 16, 1930. Wilson, Ruth. December 14-15, 1980 and 18, 1980 and January 9, and 30, 1981. Arkansas Gazette . 1969 and 1971. Baxter Bulletin . 1970. Boone County Headlight . 1968-1969. The Grapevine . 1978. Harrison Daily Times . 1968, 1972, and 1978. The Informer . 1970. Kansas City Star . 1971. Marshall Mountain Wave . 1969. Springfield News and Leader . 1978. Articles and Books. Arden; Harvey. "America's Little Mainstream." National Geographic . March, 1977, p. 348. Lackey, Walter F. History of Newton County, Arkansas . Point Lookout, Missouri: School of the Ozarks Press, 1950. Teter, Rhonda. "Granny Henderson," The Newton County Homestead. Summer, 1980, pp. 8-10. PHOTO GRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION TO ACCOMPANY REPORT. ANDERSON, Kent. ANDERSON, Kent. American, b. 1945. Genres: Adult non-fiction. Career: Writer. Publications: Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals, 1978; Sympathy for the Devil, 1987; Night Dogs, 1996. Address: c/o Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036, U.S.A. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. MLA Chicago APA. "Anderson, Kent ." Writers Directory 2005 . . Retrieved June 03, 2021 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture- magazines/anderson-kent. Citation styles. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals by Kent Anderson. QUIZ SHOW SCANDALS. No programming format mesmerized televiewers of the 1950s with more hypnotic intensity than the "big money" quiz show, one of the most popular and ill-fated genres in U.S. television history. In the 1940s, a popular radio program had awarded top prize money of $64. The new medium raised the stakes a thousand fold. From its premiere on CBS on 7 June 1955, The $64,000 Question was an immediate sensation, racking up some of the highest ratings in television history up to that time. Its success spawned a spin-off, The $64,000 Challenge , and a litter of like- minded shows: The Big Surprise, Dotto, Tic Tac Dough , and Twenty One. When the Q and A sessions were exposed as elaborate frauds, columnist Art Buchwald captured the national sense of betrayal with a glib name for the producers and contestants who conspired to bamboozle a trusting audience: the quizlings. Broadcast live and in prime time, the big money quiz show presented itself as a high pressure test of knowledge under the heat of kleig lights and the scrutiny of fifty-five million participant-observers. Set design, lighting, and pure hokum enhanced the atmosphere of suspense. Contestants were put in glass isolation booths, with the air conditioning turned off to make them sweat. Tight close-ups framed faces against darkened backgrounds and spot lights illuminated contestants in a ghostly aura. Armed police guarded "secret" envelops and impressive looking contraptions spat out pre- cooked questions on IBM cards. The big winners--like Columbia university student Elfrida Von Nardroff who earned $226,500 on Twenty One or warehouse clerk Teddy Nadler who earned $252,000 on The $64,000 Challenge-- took home a fortune in pre-inflationary greenbacks. By the standards of the dumbed-down game shows of a later epoch, the intellectual content of the 1950s quiz shows was downright erudite. Almost all the questions involved some demonstration of cerebral aptitude--retrieving lines of poetry, identifying dates from history, and reeling off scientific classifications, the stuff of memorization and canonical culture. (Who wrote "Hope is a thing with feathers/it whispers to the soul"?) Since victors returned to the show until they lost, risking accumulated winnings on future stakes, individual contestants might develop a devoted following over a period of weeks. Among the famous for fifteen pre-Warhol minutes were opera buff Gino Prato, science prodigy Robert Strom, and ex- cop and Shakespeare expert Redmond O'Hanlon. Matching an incongruous area of expertise to the right personality was a favorite hook, as in the cases of Richard McCutchen, the rugged marine captain who was an expert on French cooking, or Dr. Joyce Brothers, not then an icon of pop psychology, whose encyclopedic knowledge of boxing won her (legitimately) $132,000. If the quiz shows made celebrities out of ordinary folk, they also sought to engage the services of celebrities. Orson Welles claimed to have been approached by a quiz show producer looking for a "genius type" who guaranteed him $150,000 and a seven week engagement. Welles refused, but bandleader Xavier Cugat won $16,000 as an expert on Tin Pan Alley songs in a rigged match against actress Lillian Roth on The $64,000 Challenge. "I considered I was giving a performance," he later explained guilelessly. Twelve-year-old Patty Duke won $32,000 against child actor Eddie Hodges, then the juvenile lead in The Music Man on Broadway. Hodges had earlier won the $25,000 grand prize on Name That Tune teamed with a personable marine flyer named John Glenn. Far and away the most notorious quizling was Charles Van Doren, a contestant on NBC's Twenty One , a quiz show based on the game of blackjack. Scion of the prestigious literary family and himself a lecturer in English at Columbia University, Van Doren was an authentic pop phenomenon whose video charisma earned him $129,000 in prize money, the cover of Time magazine, and a permanent spot on NBC's Today , where he discussed non-Euclidean geometry and recited seventeenth century poetry. He put an all-American face to the university intellectual in an age just getting over its suspicion of subversive "eggheads." From the moment Van Doren walked onto the set of Twenty One on 28 November 1956 for his first face-off against a high-IQ eccentric named Herbert Stempel, he proved himself a telegenic natural. In the isolation booth, Van Doren managed to engage the spectator's sympathy by sharing his mental concentration. Apparently muttering unself-consciously to himself, he let viewers see him think: eyes alert, hand on chin, then a sudden bolt ("Oh, I know!"), after which he delivered himself of the answer. Asked to name the volumes of Churchill's wartime memoirs, he mutters, "I've seen the ad for those books a thousand times!" Asked to come up with a biblical reference, he says self-depreciatingly, "My father would know that." Van Doren's was a remarkable and seductive performance. Twenty One 's convoluted rules decreed that, in the event of a tie, the money wagered for points doubled--from $500 a point, to $1000 and so on. Thus, contestants needed to be coached not only on answers and acting but on the amount of points they selected in the gamble. A tie meant double financial stakes for each successive game with a consequent ratcheting up of the tension. By pre-game arrangement, the first Van Doren- Stempel face off ended with three ties; hence, the next week's game would be played for $2000 a point, and publicized accordingly. On Wednesday, 5 December 1956, at 10:30 P.M., an estimated 50 million Americans tune in to Twenty One for what host and co-producer Jack Berry calls "the biggest game ever played in the program." A pair of twin blondes escort the pair to their isolation booths. The first category is boxing and Van Doren blows it. Ahead sixteen points to Van Doren's zero, Stempel is given the chance to stop the game. Only the audience knows he's in the lead and, if he stops the game, Van Doren loses. At this point, on live television, Stempel could have reneged on the deal, vanquished his opponent, and won an extra $32,000. But he opts to play by the script and continue the match. The next category--movies-- proves more Van Doren friendly. Asked to name Brando's female co-star in On the Waterfront Van Doren teases briefly ("she was that lovely frail girl") before coming up with the correct answer (Eve Marie Sainte). Stempel again has the chance to ad-lib his own lines, but-- in an echo of another Brando role--it is not his night. Asked to name the 1955 Oscar Winner for Best Picture, he hesitates and answers On the Waterfront. Stempel later recalled how that choice was the unkindest cut. The correct answer--Marty--was not only a film he knew well but a character he identified with, the lonesome guy wondering what he was gonna do tonight. But another tie means another round at $2,500 a point. "You guys sure know your onions," gasps Jack Berry. The next round of questions is crucial and Van Doren is masterful. Give the names and the fates of the third, fourth, and fifth wives of Henry the Eighth. As Berry leads him through the litany, Van Doren takes the audience with him every step of the way. ("I don't think he beheaded her. Yes, what happened to her.") Given the same question, Stempel gets off his best line of the match up. After Stempel successfully names the wives, Berry asks him their fates. "Well, they all died," he cracks to gales of laughter. Van Doren stops the game and wins the round. Seemingly gracious in defeat, in reality steaming with resentment, Stempel says truthfully, "This all came so suddenly. Thanks for your kindness and courtesy." The gravy train derailed in August and September of 1958 when disgruntled former contestants went public with accusations that the results were rigged and the contestants coached. First, a standby contestant on Dotto produced a page from a winner's crib sheet. Then, the still bitter Herbert Stempel, Van Doren's former nemesis on Twenty One , told how he had taken a dive in their climatic encounter. The smoking gun was provided by an artist named James Snodgrass, who had taken the precaution of mailing registered letters to himself with the results of his appearances on Twenty One predicted in advance. Most of the high-drama match-ups, it turned out, were as carefully choreographed as the June Taylor Dancers. Contestants were drilled in Q and A before airtime and coached in the pantomime of nail-biting suspense (stroke chin, furrow brow, wipe sweat from forehead). The lucky few who struck a chord with audiences were permitted a good run before a fresh attraction took their place; the patsies were given wrist watches and a kiss off. By October 1958, as a New York grand jury convened by prosecutor Joseph Stone investigated the charges and heard closed-door testimony, quiz show ratings had plummeted. For their part, the networks played damage control, denying knowledge of rigging, canceling the suspect shows, and tossing the producers overboard. Yet it was hard to credit the Inspector Renault-like innocence of executives at NBC and CBS who claimed to be shocked that gambling was not going on in their casinos. A public relations flack for Twenty One best described the implied contract: "It was sort of a situation where a husband suspects his wife, but doesn't want to know because he loves her." Despite the revelations and the grand jury investigation, the quiz show producers, Van Doren, and the other big money winners steadfastly maintained their innocence. Solid citizens all, they feared the loss of professional standing and the loyalty of friends and family as much as the retribution of the district attorney's office. Thus, even though there was no criminal statute against rigging a quiz show, the producers and contestants called to testify before the New York grand jury mainly tried to brazen it out. Nearly one hundred people committed perjury rather than own up to activities that, though embarrassing, were not illegal. Prosecutor Joseph Stone lamented that "nothing in my experience prepared me for the mass perjury that took place on the part of scores of well-educated people who had no trouble understanding what was at stake." When the judge presiding over the New York investigations ordered the grand jury report sealed, Washington smelled a cover up and a political opportunity. Through October and November 1959, the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, chaired by Oren Harris (D-Arkansas), held standing room only hearings into the quiz show scandals. A renewed wave of publicity recorded the now repentant testimony of network bigwigs and star contestants whose minds, apparently, were concentrated powerfully by federal intervention. At one point, committee staffers came upon possible communist associations in the background of a few witnesses. The information was turned over to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a move that inspired one wiseacre to suggest the networks produce a new game show entitled Find That Pinko! Meanwhile, as newspaper headlines screamed "Where's Charlie?", the star witness everyone wanted to hear from was motoring desperately through the back roads of New England, ducking a congressional subpoena. Finally, on 2 November 1959, with tension mounting in anticipation of Van Doren's appearance to answer questions (the irony was lost on no one), the chastened professor fessed up. "I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception," he told the Harris Committee. "The fact that I too was very much deceived cannot keep me from being the principal victim of that deception, because I was its principal symbol." In another irony, Washington's made-for-TV spectacle never made it to the airwaves due to the opposition of House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who felt that the presence of television cameras would undermine the dignity of Congress. The firestorm that resulted, claimed Variety, "injured broadcasting more than anything ever before in the public eye." Even the sainted Edward R. Murrow was sullied when it was revealed that his celebrity interview show, CBS's Person to Person , provided guests with questions in advance. Perhaps most significantly in terms of the future shape of commercial television, the quiz show scandals made the networks forever leery of "single sponsorship" programming. Henceforth, they parceled out advertising time in fifteen, thirty, and sixty-second increments, wrenching control away from single sponsors and advertising agencies. The fall out from the quiz show scandals can be gauged as cultural residue and written law. To an age as yet unschooled in credibility gaps and modified, limited hang-outs, the mass deception served as an early warning signal that the medium, and American life, might not always be on the up and up. As if to deny that possibility, Congress promptly made rigging a quiz show a federal crime. A televised exhibition may be fixed; a game show must always be upright. -Thomas Doherty. FURTHER READING. Anderson, Kent. Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1978. Karp, Walter. "The Quiz-show Scandal." American Heritage (New York), May-June 1989. Real, Michael. "The Great Quiz Show Scandal: Why America Remains Fascinated." Television Quarterly (New York), Winter 1995.