Word: evens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Other Frauds. More significant even than the question of the networks' culpability or negligence about the quiz shows was the question of what the whole affair suggests about the TV industry in general. "It could happen to anyone," says NBC Board Chairman Robert Sarnoff. But it seems plain that the special TV environment, with its relentless pressure for higher ratings and higher profits, was at least in part to blame. Newly aroused by the Washington hearings, critics of television began looking for other kinds of coaxial fraud...
Headless Giant. Yet the trouble lies even deeper than that. The quiz hearings served to focus a general discontent with TV, a widespread feeling that its masters do not allow the medium to live up to its great promise. In defense, TV's top men could and did say that they have enormous problems, chief among them the vast and amorphous audience. Where a newspaper or magazine can address itself to one kind of audience, television must play...
...given rise to a dangerous new breed of editorial irresponsibility: the purchase of shows sight unseen. Last spring, Packager Don Sharpe sold Mr. Lucky to CBS; at the time he had neither cast nor pilot-only a script that was later discarded. Independents can sucker networks into financing even the shabbiest of productions. NBC spent $1,300,000 to bankroll 26 episodes of a dreary filmed comedy called Love and Marriage, managed to get some of its money back only by plopping the show into a favorable time (Mon., 8-8:30 p.m. E.S.T.), and selling it to an advertiser...
...real trouble is not that the networks buy from packagers, but that they do not exercise enough care in what they buy. Example: ABC bought the disastrous Adventures in Paradise from 20th Century-Fox, Alaskans, Bourbon Street Beat and Hawaiian Eye from Warner's-all without even seeing a pilot film. Says Adman Clyne: "Last spring we went over 200 finished pilots and another hundred ideas. We picked 40, put them on the air. Of those 40, we had confidence in only a dozen or so-and right now, I'd almost guarantee that less than ten will...
...Edmonds Kintner, 50, has no quarrel with that situation. A Swarthmore graduate, he started out as a New York Herald Tribune Wall Street reporter in 1933. Son of a Stroudsburg (Pa.) schoolteacher, Cub Kintner, a lean, spectacled Hall-of-Ivy type at the time, at first "didn't even know where Wall Street was." But he learned quickly. Though an ardent New Dealer and F.D.R. favorite, able Newsman Kintner developed and retained a high regard for big "business. For five years in Washington, he wrote a column, "The Capital Parade," in partnership with doom-crying Columnist Joseph Alsop...