From 1956 to 1958, numerous quiz shows airing on CBS and NBC, two of the three American TV networks at the time, were revealed to have prearranged outcomes, such as certain contestants winning after being given the answers before filming by producers. These shows had claimed to be objective and fair competitions, and often involved high-stakes money rewards. These revelations shocked the public, and led to numerous changes in television, which was a new and growing medium.
Executives of the networks claimed that, along with the public, they too were victims of the scandals, and that the shows' producers and contestants were responsible. The U.S. Congress investigated the scandals, and amended the Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit TV networks from prearranging the outcomes of quiz shows.
Certain conspirators were not able to work in television ever again. All of the shows involved—including The $64,000 Question and The $64,000 Challenge, The Big Surprise, Dotto, For Love or Money, Tic-Tac-Dough, and Twenty-One—were cancelled. The TV quiz show format gained a stigma among the public which only went away after Jeopardy!, a legitimate show, debuted in 1964. It became standard practice for quiz shows' networks and producers to monitor the competitions for cheating. The Twenty-One scandal was portrayed in the 1994 film Quiz Show.
Background
From the mid-1950s to the 1980s, there were three commercial broadcast television networks (the "Big Three") in the United States: ABC, CBS, and NBC. All three started out as broadcast radio networks, and by 1948, were broadcasting TV programs to multiple U.S. cities. DuMont Television Network was a fourth broadcaster from 1946 to 1956. In the 1950s, these networks adapted their popular radio programs, such as quiz shows, for the growing TV audience. The radio quiz show Take It or Leave It, for instance, was turned into The $64,000 Question for CBS's TV channel. Competitions between contestants on early radio and TV quiz shows were relatively low-stakes, as the networks did not give out money or other prizes to the winners; the legal matter as to whether these shows would constitute gambling had not been settled. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in FCC v. American Broadcasting Co., Inc. that they did not; if the prize was money, the contestants could not wager their personal funds. Soon, quiz shows involved high-stakes money rewards.
Scandal
Twenty-One In September 1956, the game show Twenty-One, hosted by Jack Barry, premiered on NBC. Its first show was played legitimately, with no manipulation of the game by the producers at all. This initial broadcast was, in the words of co-producer Dan Enright, "a dismal failure", as the two contestants were so lacking in the required knowledge that they answered a large number of the questions incorrectly. Further, show sponsor Geritol, upon seeing this opening-night performance, reportedly became furious with the results and said that they did not want to see a repeat performance.
Three months into its run, Twenty-One featured the contestant Herb Stempel. While Stempel was in the midst of his winning streak, both of the $64,000 quiz shows (The $64,000 Question and its spin-off, The $64,000 Challenge) 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 Van Doren, an English teacher at Columbia University. Van Doren decided to try out for the NBC quiz show Tic-Tac-Dough. Enright, who produced both Tic-Tac-Dough and Twenty-One, saw his tryout and was familiar with his prestigious family background that included multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and highly respected professors at Columbia. As a result, Enright felt that Van Doren would be perfect as the new face of Twenty-One.Anderson, Kent. Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1978. Print.
Stempel was then asked to allow his new opponent, Van Doren, to win the game, and Stempel was coached by Enright on how to make it happen. After achieving winnings of $69,500, Stempel's scripted loss to Van Doren occurred on December 5, 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, however, he gave the incorrect answer On the Waterfront, which had won the previous year. Although the manipulation of the contestants 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.Anderson, K. (1978). Television Fraud: The history and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals. Westport and London: Greenwood Press.
A year later, Stempel told the New York Journal-Americans Jack O'Brian that his winning run as champion on the series had been choreographed and that the show's producer had then ordered him to purposely lose his championship to Van Doren. With no proof, an article was never printed.
James Snodgrass was another contestant on the show who became a whistleblower. He had made lists of all the questions and answers on which he was coached and mailed them to his own home in a series of letters before his games aired. The dates on these letters served as indisputable proof that the show had been rigged, and Snodgrass testified before Congress on this matter in 1959.
The Big Surprise
In December 1956, Dale Logue, a contestant on NBC's The Big Surprise, filed a lawsuit against the show's production company, Entertainment Productions, Inc., seeking either $103,000 in damages or reinstatement on the show as a contestant. Her claim was that, after being asked a question she did not know the answer to in a "warm-up" session, she was asked the same question again during the televised show. Her assertion was that this was done intentionally with the express purpose of eliminating her as a contestant. At the time Logue's lawsuit was filed, Steve Carlin, executive producer of Entertainment Productions, Inc., called her claim "ridiculous and hopeless". Assertions that Logue had been offered $10,000 to settle in January 1957 were called baseless. Charles Revson, head of Revlon and The Big Surprise's primary sponsor, asked the producers if Logue's accusation was true, and was told that it was not.
Dotto In August 1958, Stempel and Logue's credibility was bolstered when Edward Hilgemeier, Jr., a stand-by contestant on the game show Dotto three months earlier, sent an affidavit to the FCC claiming that while backstage, he had found a notebook on set containing the answers contestant Marie Winn was to deliver.
Backlash In April 1957, Time magazine published an article detailing the depths to which producers manipulated game shows, just short of involving the contestants themselves. In August, Look magazine ran the article "Are TV Quiz Shows Fixed?", which concluded "it may be more accurate to say they are controlled or partially controlled."
The American public's reaction was swift and dramatic when the fraud became public; between 87% and 95% knew about the scandals as measured by industry-sponsored polls.Boddy, W.(1990). Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Through late 1958 and early 1959, quiz shows implicated by the scandal were quickly cancelled. Among them, with their last-aired dates, were: The Big Surprise (April 2, 1957) Dotto (August 15, 1958) The $64,000 Challenge (September 7, 1958) Twenty-One (October 16, 1958) The $64,000 Question (November 2, 1958) Tic-Tac-Dough, prime time edition (December 29, 1958) For Love or Money (January 30, 1959)
In late August 1958, New York prosecutor Joseph Stone convened a grand jury to investigate the allegations of the fixing of quiz shows. At the time of the empaneling, neither being a party to a fixed game show nor fixing a game show in the first place were crimes in their own right. Some witnesses in the grand jury acknowledged their role in a fixed show, while others denied it, directly contradicting one another. Many of the coached contestants, who had become celebrities due to their quiz show success, were so afraid of the social repercussions of admitting the fraud that they were unwilling to confess to having been coached, even to the point of perjuring themselves to avoid backlash. Producers who had legally rigged the games to increase ratings, but did not want to implicate themselves, their sponsors, or the networks in doing so, categorically denied the allegations. After the nine-month grand jury, no indictments were handed down and the judge sealed the grand jury report in August 1959. In October 1959, the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, under Representative Oren Harris's chairmanship, began to hold hearings to investigate the scandal. Stempel, Snodgrass, and Hilgemeier all testified.
The expansion of the probe led CBS president Frank Stanton to immediately announce cancellation of three more of its large-prize quiz shows between October 16 and October 19, 1959: Top Dollar, The Big Payoff, and Name That Tune, explaining that this decision was made "because of the impossibility of guarding against dishonest practice". On November 2 when Van Doren said to the Committee in a nationally televised session:"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 All of the regulations regarding television in the late 1950s were defined under the Communications Act of 1934, which dealt with the advertising, fair competition, and labeling of broadcast stations. The act and regulations written by the FCC were indefinite in regard to fixed television programs. Because no specific laws existed regarding fraudulent behavior in quiz shows, it is debatable whether the producers or contestants did anything illegal. Instead, one inference could be that the medium was ill-used. After concluding the Harris Commission investigation, Congress amended the Communications Act to prohibit the fixing of televised contests of intellectual knowledge or skill..
U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill into law on September 13, 1960. The legislation allowed the FCC to require license renewals of less than the legally required three years if the agency believed 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.
Contestants
Charles Van Doren, who had become a regular on NBC's Today, 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 and continued working as an editor and writer until his retirement in 1982. He refused requests for interviews for more than three decades and chose not to participate in the production of The Quiz Show Scandal, a 1992 one-hour documentary aired on PBS. He later (after discussing the matter with family members, who, with the exception of his son John, were against his participation) turned down an offer of $100,000 to act as a consultant on the 1994 feature film Quiz Show directed by Robert Redford (on which Stempel was a consultant).Van Doren, Charles, "All the Answers : The quiz-show scandals—and the aftermath", The New Yorker, July 28, 2008 In 2008, Van Doren broke his silence, describing his quiz show experience in an essay-length memoir published in The New Yorker.