Word: nbc
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...teach them cooking or astrophysics, to expound the word of many religions, to give them Shakespeare, O'Neill and Wyatt Earp-and Twenty One. But as he faced the House subcommittee last week, the man who was personally responsible for bringing most of its quiz shows to NBC ("And I'm not ashamed of it") reflected little of television's potential magic. The same witness chair had been occupied for four days by a tawdry succession of fixers and schlockmeisters, corrupters and corrupted (see above). Bob Kintner had gone to Washington with the difficult task of showing...
Belated Recognition. Kintner began by giving NBC's official chronology of the Twenty One affair. When Herbert Stempel made his first charges that the show was crooked in September 1957, NBC officials did not report the matter to Kintner or Board Chairman Robert W. Sarnoff, but took Producer Dan Enright's assurance that Stempel was lying. A year later, when the Stempel charges finally broke in the press, NBC still took the word of Producer Enright and his partner, Jack Barry, relying largely on their "excellent reputation"; Kintner was not asked and did not tell the committee that...
Then Kintner added the remarkable claim that NBC had got its "first established evidence of quiz-show rigging" only through the Washington hearings, and that he had not known about any kind of rigging until mid-August...
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...
What Is a Network? Viewers who hear the familiar NBC chimes and see the familiar linked initials are apt to think of "the network" as a solid entity. But few know what a network really is. Strictly speaking, as Bob Kintner puts it, it is "programs and a lot of telephone wire." The wire (44,000 miles, rented from A.T.&T. at $17.4 million a year) loosely holds together NBC's five wholly owned stations (by FCC ruling, no individual or corporation may own more than seven radio or TV outlets), plus 207 independently owned affiliates with which NBC...