Word: question
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Most of us have a great deal of larceny in us," drawled the Rev. Charles ("Stony") Jackson of Tullahoma, Tenn. "The fact that I am an ordained minister [Disciples of Christ] does not make me a saint." In 1957 Jackson wrote to The $64,000 Question, said he planned a book about quizzes (working title: Hucksters and Suckers), asked for help. The producers took the hint. Back came an invitation for Stony to audition as a contestant. The category chosen for the pastor: great love stories. After producers fed him the romantic answers in "screening" sessions, he rolled...
...Challenge match on Tin Pan Alley only because Producer Mert Koplin supplied the answers to him. "Cugie" won $16,000-and slipped 10% to his publicity man, who arranged his spot on the show for the pressagentry value of the thing. Cugie was no exception. On the Question and Challenge shows, 60% to 70% of the winners got help, testified Producer Koplin, and so did practically every winner who scaled the $32,000 plateau...
Many were the kinds of fixes, testified Koplin. Among them: the Area Fix, i.e., questions were pitched within the contestants' strong and specific areas of knowledge. (This was usually the case, declared Koplin, with Challenge's Teddy Nadler, who won $252,000.) There was also the Playback (questions had been asked in pre-game tests) and the Emergency (questions and answers were given the contestants, usually just before the show). "Emergencies" produced some Keystone Cops fiascos; often the fixer had to spring down to the celebrated bank vault, where the questions were held, quickly slip in the rigged...
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...
...blame? In trying to answer that question, critics are baffled by the fact that television is a shapeless giant that often seems to be functioning without a head...