1950s quiz show scandals

In late 1956, Herb Stempel was a contestant on Twenty-One who was coached by 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 Van Doren, who was an English teacher at Columbia University when a friend suggested he try out for a quiz show. Van Doren decided to try out for the quiz show Tic-Tac-Dough. 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.[8] As part of their plan, the producers of Twenty-One arranged the first Van Doren-Stempel face-off to end in three ties. As prize money per-point in the margin of victory increased by $500 after each tie game, the next game would offer $2,000 for every point the winner led by; this was duly-noted in promotion of the following week's episode, which helped to attract significant viewership.

After achieving winnings of $69,500, Stempel's scripted loss to the more popular 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, Stempel gave the incorrect answer On the Waterfront, winner of Best Motion Picture the previous year). 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.[9] Initially, Stempel was dismissed as a sore loser, due in part to the fact that there was no solid reason to question the reputations of the quiz shows themselves.

In December 1956, a contestant on The Big Surprise, Dale Logue, filed a lawsuit against the show, seeking $103,000 in monetary damages or reinstatement on the show as a contestant. Her claim was that, after being asked a question she did not know in a "warm-up" session, that 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. (the producers of The Big Surprise) called her claim "ridiculous and hopeless".[10] Assertions that Logue had been offered $10,000 to settle in January 1957 were called baseless.[11] Charles Revson, head of Revlon and The Big Surprise's primary sponsor, asked the producers of the show if Logue's accusation was true, and was told that it was not.[12] The Big Surprise was cancelled by April 1957, after a low level Federal Trade Commission investigation had been launched. Concluded a year later, the FTC only sought statements from the producers of the show asserting that it was above board.

In April 1957, Time magazine had published an article asserting the depths to which producers managed game shows, to depths just short of involving the contestants themselves.[13] This was followed by the August 20, 1957 Look magazine article "Are TV Quiz Shows Fixed?" which concluded "it may be more accurate to say they are controlled or partially controlled."[12] Doubt had now been sown about the integrity of the shows.

In August 1958, the abrupt cancellation of the quiz show Dotto bolstered Stempel and Logue's credibility of contestant involvement in rigging, when Edward Hilgemeier, Jr, a stand-by contestant three months earlier, sent an affidavit to the Federal Communications Commission claiming that while backstage, he had found a notebook containing the very answers contestant Marie Winn was delivering on stage.[14] Although the reason for Dotto's August cancellation was never given to the press, it was worked out in the days after that the reason was the implication that the game had been fixed. The story of fixing was widely known soon after. 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.[15] Through late 1958 and early 1959, quiz shows implicated by the scandal were quickly cancelled. Among them, with their last-aired dates, were the following shows:

• Dotto (August 15, 1958)
• The $64,000 Challenge (September 7)[16]
• Twenty-One (October 16)
• The $64,000 Question (November 2)[17]
• Tic-Tac-Dough, primetime edition (December 29)
• For Love or Money (January 30, 1959)[18][19]

Late in 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. Show producers, who had legally rigged the games to increase ratings but did not want to implicate themselves, the show sponsors or the networks they worked for 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 Summer 1959.[4] The 86th United States Congress, by then in its first session, soon responded; in October 1959, the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, under Representative Oren Harris' chairmanship, began to hold hearings investigating the scandal. Stempel, Snodgrass and Hilgemeier all testified.[20] Van Doren, initially reluctant, finally agreed to testify also in a press conference on October 15. The House committee then announced plans to expand their probe into quiz shows.

The expansion of the quiz show 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,[21] "because of the impossibility of guarding against dishonest practice".[22] 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."[23]

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 illegal. Instead, it could be inferred that the medium was ill-used.[9] After concluding the Harris Commission investigation, Congress amended the Communications Act to prohibit the fixing of televised contests of intellectual knowledge or skill.[24][25]

Therefore, the bill that President Eisenhower signed into law on September 13, 1960, was a fairly mild improvement to the broadcast industry. The legislation 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.[9] 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.

Many quiz show contestants' reputations were ruined, including:

• Charles 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. Van Doren took a job as an editor at Encyclopedia 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 in the United States on PBS. He later turned down an offer of $100,000 to act as a consultant on the 1994 Robert Redford-directed feature film Quiz Show after discussing the matter with his family members who, with the exception of his son John, were against his participation.[26] In 2008, Van Doren broke his silence, describing his quiz show experience in an essay-length memoir published in The New Yorker.[26] Van Doren died on April 9, 2019.
• Marie Winn, whose notebook triggered Dotto's exposure and subsequent demise, eventually became a journalist whose books include The Plug-In Drug, a scathing critique on television's influence over children.
• Teddy Nadler, whose $264,000 haul on The $64,000 Challenge stood as a record for two decades, resorted to applying for a temporary job with the United States Census Bureau when his prize money started running short; he failed the civil service exam.[27] In 1970, producers exonerated Nadler, stating that they had shown him questions beforehand but that he already knew the answers and did not need them given to him.[28]
• Lenny Ross, who at age 10 won a combined $164,000 on The Big Surprise and The $64,000 Challenge, suffered from major mental health issues, including depression and attention-deficit disorder, which limited his ability to work as an author and attorney in adulthood; most of his work was completed by other co-authors. After an unsuccessful cingulotomy, Ross committed suicide in 1985 at age 39.[29]

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.[15] Some producers included Barry, 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 blacklisted from national television until 1969. Enright went to Canada to continue working in television and was unable to get another job in American television until Barry's own recovery from the scandal allowed him to bring Enright back as a partner in 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, which is now KDAY. Barry returned to hosting with The Generation Gap in 1969 and had success with The Joker's Wild, which premiered in 1972 and ended in 1975. Barry and Enright resumed their partnership full-time in 1976. Their production of game shows, notably the syndicated revivals of Tic-Tac-Dough (which Barry did not host) and Joker (which he did) in the late 1970s to mid-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 using revenue from their renewed success.

Other producers met the same fate as Barry and Enright, but were unable to redeem themselves afterwards unlike those two. One of the more notable is 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 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 later stated that his unintentional "predilection for asking the answers" was a factor in his decision to only rarely host game shows after the scandals.[30]) Fox's replacement, Ralph Story, went on to become a newscaster for KNXT-TV/KCBS-TV in Los Angeles.

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."[31] 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, the number of programs that could make up one broadcast week). 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. Professional bowlers competed for prizes on these shows and the shows were typically considered sporting programs rather than game shows; Jackpot Bowling was reformatted as a comedy show with Milton Berle as host to shift that show's emphasis in 1960. Those shows continued to air into the early 1960s. The original version of The Price Is Right and CBS's slate of low-budget panel games were largely unaffected by the collapse; those shows would continue to air on network television into the mid-1960s, with The Price Is Right still offering lavish prizes throughout its prime time run.

A quiz for big money would not return until ABC premiered 100 Grand in 1963; it went off the air after three shows, never awarding its top prize. Quiz shows still held a stigma throughout much of the 1960s, a stigma that was eventually eased by the success of the lower-stakes and fully legitimate answer-and-question game Jeopardy!.[32] It would not be until the late 1960s that five-figure prizes would again be offered on American television, and not until the late 1970s that six-figure prizes could be won; seven-figure prizes were sparingly awarded on The $1,000,000 Chance of a Lifetime (which aired between 1986 and 1987), but would not be fully introduced until August 1999 when Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? premiered, setting off an era of million-dollar game shows including Greed (which premiered in November 1999), The Weakest Link (which premiered in April 2001) and Deal or No Deal (which premiered in December 2005 and became a regular series in March 2006). Australia's short-lived Million Dollar Wheel of Fortune format was adopted to the U.S. version in 2008, and Millionaire ultimately ended its run in syndication in May 2019 after seventeen seasons. ABC limited a contestant's winnings to $30,000 (although contestants were retired after winning $20,000) before permanently removing the limit in 1984. CBS initially limited a contestant's winnings to $25,000 beginning in 1972; contestants were allowed to keep up to $10,000 in excess of this limit, which would increase to $50,000 in 1984 (after Michael Larson won $110,237 on Press Your Luck by memorizing the game board's light patterns; contestants were now allowed to keep up to $25,000 above that limit and the next one), $75,000 in 1986 (which did not apply to the short-lived Blackout in 1988 due to its maximum total winnings of $54,000) and $125,000 in 1990 (with no money being allowed above that limit) before being permanently eliminated by 2006, when contestants on the current incarnation of The Price Is Right won over $140,000 in both the first and final episodes of the season during Bob Barker's final season; the show has since offered a high-stakes $100,000 pricing game, prizes over $100,000 during themed weeks (Big Money and Dream Car) and has also offered $1,000,000 in primetime specials. NBC never utilized a winnings limit on any of its game shows but kept cash and prizes within a reasonable range that created a de facto limit (for instance until its 1989 NBC cancellation, Wheel of Fortune forced contestants to cash in their winnings per round on presented merchandise or apply it to a gift certificate or build their winnings for a later round at the risk of losing those winnings on penalties such as a "Bankrupt" spin). Some syndicated game shows also used a winnings limit: for example, contestants on Jeopardy! were limited to $75,000 in regular play between the start of its current incarnation in 1984 to 1990 (with any excess winnings being donated to a charity of the contestant's choice); after Frank Spangenberg set the winnings record with $102,597, the cap was raised to $100,000, and later to $200,000 in 1997 (before being abolished in 2001 after the clue values were doubled). Jeopardy!'s five-day champions limit was abolished in 2003, allowing for the show to create star contestants; since then, five contestants appeared on the show five or more consecutive weeks: Ken Jennings (15 weeks, 74 wins), James Holzhauer (6.2 weeks, 32 wins), Julia Collins (4.2 weeks, 20 wins), David Madden (4 weeks, 19 wins), and Jason Zuffranieri (4 weeks, 19 wins); Matt Jackson (13), Austin Rogers (12), Seth Wilson (12), and Arthur Chu (11) were the other double-digit game winners on the show since the rule change.

The demise of the big-money quiz shows also gave rise to television's newest phenomenon: westerns. The disappearance of quiz shows, many of which were (apparent) demonstrations of highbrow intelligence and their replacement by dumbed-down game shows may have been one of many factors in the end of the Golden Age of Television; by 1960, numerous television critics were lamenting the rise of a vast wasteland of lowbrow television.

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. In 1960, this resulted in the Independent Television Authority's placement of a permanent winnings cap for ITV game shows of £1,000, which the Independent Broadcasting Authority increased to £6,000 in 1981 (though the British version of The $64,000 Question did receive special permission to offer £6,400 when it premiered in 1990). The winnings cap was permanently eliminated by the IBA's successor organization, the Independent Television Commission in 1993. For many decades, British game shows earned a reputation for being cheap, low-budget affairs that focused more on entertainment than actual game play and prizes, in large part because of the restrictions put on game shows following the scandal. In addition to prize limits, games of chance were also largely forbidden, meaning that a number of American game shows could not be faithfully reproduced in the U.K. The lifting of these limits initially allowed more American shows to be adapted into British versions and within a few years, the rise of game shows with much higher prize limits — in particular Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — would originate largely in the U.K. and make its way to both the R.T. and the U.S. in the late 1990s.