Quiz show scandals
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The American quiz show scandals of the 1950s were the result of the revelation that contestants of several popular television quiz shows were secretly given assistance by the producers to arrange the outcome of a supposedly fair competition.
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[edit] Background to the scandals
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In the 1950s, television burst into the mainstream. While at the beginning of the decade only 9% of U.S. households had a television, over half had one by 1954, and 86% had them by the end of the decade. The medium proved to be a powerful influence on American society.
Over the same period, the United States was engaged in a technology race with the Soviet Union, as a component of the Cold War. American military and political dominance was bolstered by the nation's technologies that harnessed the power of the atom. This focus on technological superiority contributed to a national reverence of intelligence and knowledge.
It was against this backdrop that quiz shows became popular. Questions asked on these shows required substantial knowledge across a broad spectrum of cerebral topics. The spectacle of people achieving huge financial success through the exercise of brain power was riveting to a nation that revered intellectualism as well as wealth.
[edit] Prizes grow
The 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Federal Communications Commission v. American Broadcasting Co., Inc. that quiz shows were not a form of gambling paved the way for their introduction to television. The prizes of these new shows were astonishing in magnitude, and gave them an aura of significance that went well beyond mere entertainment. The $64,000 Question's predecessor radio show was The $64 Question, and few prizes exceeded even $100. There was no gradual escalation; The $64,000 Question debuted on June 7, 1955, with a top prize a thousand times bigger than the shows that had gone before. ($64,000 in 1955 is equivalent to approximately $491,000 in 2007[1].)
[edit] The scandals
[edit] Sponsor interference leads to outcome rigging
In the 1950s, it was common practice for game shows and other shows to be sponsored solely by one company, even to the extent of having the company's name in the title of the show. Examples included Sylvania's Beat the Clock, or Geritol's Twenty-One.
It was empirically determined by show sponsors and the networks that influencing the outcome of a game show could increase the dramatic value, and therefore its attraction to viewers. More viewers naturally increased the advertising exposure a sponsored company would receive.
Outcome influence came in many forms, some relatively benign. For example, contestants would be given stage directions on how to act while on camera. On The $64,000 Question, contestants were placed in an "isolation booth" when answering questions, presumably to prevent them from receiving any help from the audience. To heighten the drama, the ventilating fans in the isolation booth were turned off after the question was asked. Under the hot stage lights, the temperature rose quickly, causing the contestant to sweat visibly. This would lead contestants to mop their brows before answering the question.
Other forms of influence were less benign. More popular contestants would be asked questions within their areas of expertise, or even provided the answers to upcoming questions. Less popular contestants would be given more difficult questions in areas outside their expected knowledge.
Fortunately, sponsor interference was not foolproof by any means. The best example of this is Dr. Joyce Brothers. Charles Revson, whose Revlon cosmetics firm was the sponsor of The $64,000 Question, hated Brothers, and he therefore forced the producers to give her difficult questions about boxing, originally not the sport on which she was an expert aside from her profession. But she made herself an expert on boxing, managed to answer the questions without help, and won legitimately. Her career as a public figure began from there.
The most notorious participants in this deception were Charles Lincoln Van Doren and Herbert Stempel, leading competitors on Twenty-One, hosted by Jack Barry. Both were heavily coached by Dan Enright, one of the show's producers, as told in the 1994 film Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford, in which Ralph Fiennes played Van Doren, with John Turturro as Stempel and Christopher McDonald as Barry.
[edit] The story is revealed
Stempel's scripted loss to the more-popular Van Doren occurred on December 5, 1956, and involved his deliberately getting the answer to a question about an Academy Award-winning movie wrong. (The correct answer was Marty, one of Stempel's favorite movies.) After his scripted loss, Stempel blew the whistle on the operation. Initially, he was dismissed as a sore loser, and not till August 1958 was his credibility bolstered. Ed Hilgemeyer, a contestant on Dotto, announced that he had found a notebook containing the very answers contestant Marie Winn was delivering on stage. But the final stroke came from Twenty-One contestant James Snodgrass, who had sent registered letters to himself containing the advance answers. Such evidence was irrefutable.
By October, the story was everywhere, and the quiz shows's Nielsen ratings were dropping. The networks denied everything and canceled the now-suspicious shows. 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.
The 86th 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. Anna Marie "Patty" Duke, then a child actress, testified to having been coached, as did Stempel, Snodgrass, and Hilgemeyer. But the bombshell dropped on November 2 when Van Doren said to the Committee, "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."
[edit] Aftermath of the scandals
[edit] Law and politics
The entire matter was called "a terrible thing to do to the American people" by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After concluding the Harris Commission investigation, Congress passed a law prohibiting the fixing of quiz shows.[1] 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.
[edit] Contestants
Many quiz show contestants's reputations were ruined. Van Doren, 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. He became a recluse and was still refusing to talk about his role in the scandal as of mid-March 2008.
[edit] Hosts and producers
Host Jack Barry and his partner, producer Dan Enright suffered the most from the scandals as the result of the rigging of Twenty-One. Barry, who had no direct involvement in the rigging, did not work in national television for 10 years, while Enright headed to Canada to continue working in television. Although he went through a difficult five-year period (according to an interview he did with TV Guide before his death in 1984), Barry moved to Los Angeles, eventually finding work on local television and buying a Redondo Beach radio station. Barry and Enright would resume their partnership in 1976. Their production of squeaky-clean game shows, notably the syndicated Tic Tac Dough, which Barry did not host, and The Joker's Wild, which he did, in the middle-to-late 1970s and early 1980s resulted in millions of dollars in revenue and, what was even better for both, forgiveness from the public for their involvement in the scandals. Indeed, Barry and Enright were able to sponsor the teen-sex comedy Private Lessons, based on Dan Greenburg's novel Philly and starring Eric Brown alongside Sylvia Kristel versus 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.
Hosts such as Jack Narz and Hal March continued to work on television after the scandals. March died in 1970 from cancer, and Narz retired in 1980.
[edit] Television
Quiz shows all but 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. A quiz for big money would not return until ABC showed 100 Grand in 1963; it went off the air after two weeks. The big-money jackpots returned to TV in 1973 with the success of the Pyramid series, starting with The $10,000 Pyramid. Eleven years later came the Alex Trebek-hosted revival of Jeopardy! with its own increased dollar amounts.
Networks were forced to adapt winnings limits to meet Standards & Practices guidelines. CBS imposed a winnings cap limit which increased as follows:
- 1972: Any contestants whose total winnings reached $25,000 would retire from the show on which they played, but could not keep any winnings over that amount.
- 1978: Contestants still retired after winning $25,000 but were allowed to keep up to $35,000 (increased to $50,000 by 1982) of their winnings.
- 1984: Contestants could keep up to $75,000. In November contestants retired after winning $50,000.
- 1986: Contestants retired after winning $75,000, but kept a maximum of $100,000.
- early 1990s: The limit for daytime winnings increased to $125,000.
- 2006: As there is just one daytime game show left, and syndicated (including CBS-distributed) game shows had abolished earnings caps, the daytime winnings limit was eliminated. This allowed prizes of over $100,000 to be offered, most notably on a June 11, 2007 episode of The Price Is Right, during Bob Barker's final week, when a recreational vehicle prize on Golden Road was valued at over $100,000. The contestant never reached that prize level.
NBC game show limits involved the maximum number of games a champion could play, with no limit on winnings. One contestant, Barbara Phillips, became the first daytime game show contestant to win over $100,000, by retiring with over $150,000 on the 1980s version of Sale of the Century. ABC imposed a cap limit of $25,000 during the mid-1970s, despite requiring contestants to retire after winning $20,000. The limit would later require players to retire after winning over $25,000. The limit would be lifted by 1984.
The limit on winnings on The Price Is Right was a daytime limit of $125,000, but that limit was also removed when Season 35 featured two contestants winning over $140,000 -- $147,517 on the season premiere, and $140,235 on the season finale (Bob Barker's last show).
The game show earnings cap of $75,000, which resulted from the scandal, forced Jeopardy! contestant Frank Spangenberg to give up $27,597 of his $102,597 winnings to charity. After a second contestant gave up over $7,000, Jeopardy! raised its earnings cap on regular season shows, first to $100,000, then to $200,000 after automobiles were awarded for five-time champions (this was before the 2001 doubling of values), and removed after the show went to unlimited champions, with Ken Jennings winning $75,000 on one game, the final show of Season 20, which led to part of his $2.52 million in winnings.
Wheel of Fortune has imposed a winnings limit of $200,000, although no one has ever reached this amount as of 2008.
Networks required game shows to be heavily monitored by their standards and practices departments. Contestants were kept away from anybody who might know questions to be asked. The scandal also marked an end to widespread naming of television shows by their sponsors. Future game shows like The Price is Right or Let's Make a Deal were not sponsored by any one company.
It has been suggested[citation needed] that the scandals helped inspire Merv Griffin's 1964 introduction of Jeopardy! and its peculiar answer-and-question format, where contestants were given answers to the questions, but contestants had to give the question to win.
In addition, the major television networks took a greater hand in creative production to avoid similar problems in the future. This extended to changes to unrelated television series, like demanding that the premise of the dramatic series Mr. Lucky be changed from a riverboat casino to a restaurant to avoid the idea of games on prime time TV.
[edit] Other media
The altered reality of Philip K. Dick's Time out of Joint (1959) is a science fiction reworking of the deceptions Dick saw on the quiz shows.
These scandals are dramatized in the feature film Quiz Show.
This scandal is an element of John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent.
A possible reference to the quiz show scandals was mentioned on The Simpsons Episode 9F08 "Lisa's First Word." Homer encourages his father to sell his house, to which Abe Simpson objects, "All I own is this house that I built with my own two hands." Homer replies, "You didn't build this house, you won it on a crooked 50s game show!" Abe then laughs and remarks, "I ratted on everybody and got off scott free! Hah-hah!"
[edit] More recent scandals
[edit] Michael Larson
In 1984, Press Your Luck contestant Michael Larson memorized the patterns of the game board, which were believed to be random but in fact were predictably repetitive, to help him stop the board where and when he wanted. He took 47 consecutive "spins" without stopping on a "Whammy," which would have erased all his winnings; as a result, he accumulated $110,237 in cash and prizes. Larson's tactics became evident because, apparently, he had not devised an exit strategy. He had no way to stop to give other contestants a turn without the risk of losing his substantial winnings. Because Larson never actually cheated, but instead merely used his intelligence to exploit a flawed game design, Press Your Luck's network, CBS, and the production company, the Carruthers Company, gave him the money and the prizes after Larson threatened a lawsuit. Afterward, CBS made the pattern of the game board more complex. Its sequel, Whammy!, used a computer in its two-season run on GSN for a much more random set of patterns.
The late Peter Tomarken, who had been the host of Press Your Luck at the time, hosted and narrated a documentary titled Big Bucks: The "Press Your Luck" Scandal, which explored what Larson had done on the show. Tomarken remarked of Larson, during his narration of the documentary, "He whammied the Whammy."
[edit] 3 Strikes incidents on The Price Is Right
During a playing of the 3 Strikes pricing game on The Price Is Right in 1992, one contestant is believed to have cheated; with two strikes against him and one number remaining in the bag, the contestant (allegedly) grabbed a chip from the bag, noticed that it was the third strike, and quickly dropped the chip to pull the number out of the bag and win the car. Despite the suspicion, the contestant was nevertheless awarded the prize; however, for the next several months, 3 Strikes used a new set of strike chips that were the same color as the number chips. Another contestant, playing the same game on the same show four years earlier, also appeared to be cheating in a similar way. But host Bob Barker, who by then had also become the Executive Producer of the show, did notice this. He forced her to pull the chip out, and she lost the game.
[edit] Charles Ingram cheat and Martin Flood rumor
In an episode of the British Who Wants to Be a Millionaire show (which airs on ITV1) recorded on September 10, 2001, Major Charles Ingram won the £1,000,000 (about US$2,000,000) prize. Following subsequent analysis of the tape by the producers of the show, it became apparent Ingram was being helped to select the correct answers by a fellow contestant coughing. The prize was not awarded and Ingram and accomplices were taken to court. Martin Flood, the second AU$1,000,000 (about US$871,000) winner on the Australian version of said show (which airs on the Nine Network) was also rumored to have been cheating in the same way Ingram did, but the rumor proved to be false, according to the current affairs program Today Tonight (in fact, unlike Ingram, Flood wasn't even aware of the rumor until it came out following taping of his second episode). According to the show, the rumor was nothing more than a false report to boost up Aussie Millionaire's ratings.
[edit] The "Outstandingly stupid quiz"
Late in 2004, a phone-in game show from Greece suffered another scandal. TV presenters, station officials, and producers were arrested after being charged with fraud, after it was revealed that show organizers were only taking the calls of accomplices, who all gave purposefully wrong answers on an "outstandingly stupid quiz", according to an online article. They had made €10,000,000 of toll charges, with over 115,000 people calling over a 5-month period, without any of the honest participants getting through into the show. Some were kept on their phones for over 15 minutes before disconnection, although most gave up before that time. The producers tried out this system for themselves, running up a €225 bill for each attempt before being arrested.
[edit] Deal or No Deal Randomizations
- Further information: Deal or No Deal (UK game show)#Predictable sequences
In early 2006, some viewers of the UK version of Deal or No Deal (which airs on Channel 4) noticed that the distribution of the prize amounts in the 22 numbered boxes did not appear to be random, and instead followed one of a small number of distinct sequences, with only the start point of the sequence varying. This was raised on a number of fan sites for the show and later made the national press. The show's producer revealed that the problem was due to a faulty Microsoft Excel random number generator the show's independent adjudicators used. That random-number generator was not being seeded properly, the producer explained, which led to the same sequences being repeated. As this had been noticed before most of the shows were transmitted, it led to the system being replaced by manual drawing of numbers. There was no evidence to suggest that any of the contestants, or the unseen Banker who made monetary offers for the contestant's box, knew of the sequences. In theory, a contestant who had been aware of this flaw could have won the £250,000 (about US$516,000) top prize by working out which box contained it, leaving it until last if it were not their own box, saying "no deal" all the way and then accepting the offer of a swap from the Banker (although there is no guarantee the swap will be offered in any particular game).
[edit] The Hello Pappy scandal
- Further information: Wowowee Willyonaryo Controversy
In August 2007, the Philippine ABS-CBN game show Wowowee was the subject of a scandal involving Willyonaryo, a game on the show. The jackpot round involved a choice between 12 wheels containing different prizes, the one used being chosen by a game of Pinball. The contestant did not choose to risk the P100,000 she was offered by host Willie Revillame in exchange for what was potentially inside her wheel. This would have resulted in her only winning the P37,000 she won from the Pinball game - over the combined P137,000 she could have won and the possible top prize of P2,000,000 (about US$45,000). But, when it was revealed that the P2,000,000 grand prize was inside a Violet colored wheel and the host revealed it - the wheel not only contained a 0, but it also contained several other plastic films, one containing a 2 (which would have awarded PHP2,000,000), and a dark colored cover film, leading to speculation that the host could arrange for any of several numbers to appear.
[edit] Nothing But the Truth
The original Colombian version of Nothing But the Truth was also the subject of a scandal, only no cheating was involved. Contestant Rosa Maria Solano answered "yes" to a question that asked whether or not she hired a hit man to kill her husband. As a result of this incident, Canal Caracol, the network that aired the show, had been ordered to pull it off the air, though Solano would leave with COL$50,000,000 (about US$25,000).
[edit] References
- ^ Enacted in the 1960 amendments to the Communications act. See 47 U.S.C. §509 and assoc. legislative history.
- Stone, Joseph; and Tim Yohn (1992). Prime Time and Misdemeanors: Investigating the 1950s TV Quiz Scandal. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-1753-2.
- Tedlow, Richard (1976). "Intellect on Television: The Quiz Show Scandals of the 1950s". American Quarterly 28 (4): 483-495.
[edit] External sources
- Arcane Radio Trivia article on Radio Quiz Show history
- NPR Article on Radio Quiz Shows
- PBS Article on Radio Quiz Shows
