TELEVISION: Why Quiz Show Is a Scandal

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The film begs the most interesting question raised by the quiz-show scandals: Just what was so scandalous about them? Rigging them was deceptive, to be sure. But these were the early, Wild West days of TV, when the rules were still being written. Stars did commercials for products they never used; Edward R. Murrow pretended to "drop in" on celebrities in Person to Person. Manipulating quiz shows to affect the outcome was hardly new -- or surprising. Two years before Van Doren admitted his sins, Time ran a story that began, "Are the quiz shows rigged?" and went on to detail ways producers stacked the deck in favor of certain players, like posing questions in a contestant's strongest area of knowledge. Fooling the public is a venerable show-biz tradition; the quiz-show producers found out, to their dismay, just how much fooling the public was willing to accept.

For Redford and company, however, the scandal foreshadows just about every mess from Vietnam to Watergate. Near the end of the film, after the congressional hearings have exposed the rigging, an associate congratulates | Goodwin. "For what?" he scoffs, upset that the top TV execs have denied any role in the affair. "I thought we were going to get television. The truth is, television is going to get us." It's the film's most disingenuous line. The bigwigs may have escaped punishment, but the scandals rocked TV as nothing before or since: quiz shows vanished from the air, ethical standards were drastically tightened (CBS President Frank Stanton even proposed banning canned laughter), and the industry suffered a black eye that took decades to heal. "Get television" is exactly what Goodwin and his colleagues did. Quiz Show does too; it just doesn't have the grace to admit it.