With stiff competition for viewers, quiz show sponsors and independent producers made their programs more exciting with practices that were deceptive but not illegal in the 1950s. National Broadcasting Company President Robert Kintner claimed his network had not been aware of the deceptions, but he proposed that the U.S. Criminal Code prohibit knowing participation in rigged broadcast contests.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress
Draft of Statute Making Rigging of Broadcast Contests a Criminal Offense, by Robert Kintner, President, National Broadcasting Co., Inc., November 5, 1959
Television Quiz Shows
Television quiz shows offering substantial cash prizes became enormously popular in the 1950s. Their future was jeopardized, however, when in December 1956 Columbia University Professor Charles Van Doren beat longtime winner Herbert Stempel on the quiz show Twenty-One. Stempel later complained to the New York district attorney that the show was rigged. Following a grand jury investigation, the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight further investigated television quiz shows. The committee heard testimony from network officials, producers, and contestants, including Van Doren. After initial denials, Van Doren attested that Twenty-One was fixed. On the committee’s recommendation, Congress passed legislation in 1960 making quiz-show rigging a federal crime.
It is symptomatic of some far more basic problems in this whole industry with you people in a mad rush to develop something which is salable, which will draw a greater dollar, without any regard to public obligation.
Representative John E. Moss of California, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 1959–1960
With stiff competition for viewers, quiz show sponsors and independent producers made their programs more exciting with practices that were deceptive but not illegal in the 1950s. National Broadcasting Company President Robert Kintner claimed his network had not been aware of the deceptions, but he proposed that the U.S. Criminal Code prohibit knowing participation in rigged broadcast contests.
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress
