Word: roper
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...wasteland" that Newton Minow complained about in 1961 is still parched; a Roper Research study found that 18% of TV viewers agreed with Minow in 1963, and 29% are with him today. Television journalism and sports coverage are getting better, and even commercials are improving; but regularly scheduled programs are still as vapid as ever. Mindless game shows and cheery-teary soapers dominate daytime television. Prime-time TV (7:30-11 p.m.) is hardly more satisfactory. The top-rated Nielsen shows for 1966-67 are either tired adventure series such as Bonanza and Dragnet or low-IQ sitch-coms...
...networks have made the most of them, news shows like Cronkite's have become one of the most important and influential molders of public opinion in the U.S. Some 58% of the U.S. public get most of their news from television, reported an Elmo Roper poll last year...
Denis Hillier, a middle-aged spy looking forward to retirement, embarks on his last mission: to kidnap a turncoat British scientist named Roper, who is cooking rocket fuel for Russia. Adventures both sexual and gastronomic occur en route, for Hillier is a gluttonous satyr. Men die bloodily, some of them propelled into the hereafter by Hillier himself. The mission fails, not for want of Hillier's trying, but because his quarry refuses to go back...
Scientific Skepticism. At the subterranean level, the book deals with moral issues that seem remote from spydom's amoral domain. As a schoolboy, Roper applied scientific skepticism to religion. "Does Christ reside in the molecules themselves," he asked, pondering the Eucharist, "or only in the molecules organized into bread?" Later, war service destroyed both his worlds, religion and science: "What's the point of fighting if we don't believe that one way of life is better than another...
...these activities are Hillier's veils, and soon they must reveal his deepening moral crisis. Once behind the Iron Curtain, he finds Roper and discovers that the scientist did not turn his coat after all: he was shanghaied. Furthermore, nobody really wants him: neither the Russians, who accepted him only as a useful political pawn, nor the English, who jobbed him for much the same reason. Hillier also finds that nobody wants him either. He was sent to Russia so that an assassin, hired by his own intelligence agency, could erase a mind already too full of dangerous secrets...