Quiz Show Scandals - Revelation

Revelation

Herb Stempel was a contestant on Twenty-One who was coached by the show's producer Dan Enright. After achieving a score of $69,500, Stempel's scripted loss to the more popular Charles Van Doren occurred on December 5, 1956. One of the questions Stempel got wrong involved the winner of the 1955 Academy Award for Best Motion Picture. (The correct answer was Marty, one of Stempel's favorite movies; as instructed by Enright, Stempel gave the incorrect answer On the Waterfront.) After his preordained loss, Stempel spoke out against the operation, claiming that he deliberately lost the match against Van Doren on orders from Enright.

Initially, Stempel was dismissed as a sore loser and it wasn't until August 1958 that his credibility was bolstered. Ed Hilgemeyer, a contestant on Dotto, announced that he had found a notebook containing the very answers contestant Marie Winn was delivering on stage. But the final stroke came from Twenty-One contestant James Snodgrass, who had sent registered letters to himself containing the advance answers. Such evidence was irrefutable. It eventually emerged that the Twenty-One debut on September 12, 1956 had gone so badly that sponsor Geritol called producers Barry and Enright the following day and demanded changes. Under pressure, Enright and his partner Albert Freedman decided to rig the show. Jack Barry, the show's host and co-owner of Barry-Enright Productions, was not involved in the actual rigging, but later helped in the cover-up.

By October 1958, the story was everywhere and the quiz shows' Nielsen ratings were dropping. The networks denied everything and canceled the now-suspicious shows. The people's reactions were quick and powerful when the quiz show fraud became public. Between 87 and 95% of the American public was informed about the scandals as measured by industry-sponsored polls. Meanwhile, New York prosecutor Joseph Stone convened a grand jury to investigate the charges. Many of the coached contestants, who had become celebrities due to their quiz-show success, were so afraid of the social repercussions that they were unwilling to confess to having been coached, even to the point of perjuring themselves to avoid backlash. The judge sealed the grand jury report for unknown reasons.

The 86th Congress, by then in its first session, quickly saw the political opportunity the scandals offered; in October 1959, the House Committee on Legislative Oversight, under Representative Oren Harris's chairmanship, began to hold hearings investigating the scandal. Patty Duke, then a child actress who had competed on The $64,000 Challenge (a companion show to The $64,000 Question), testified to having been coached, as did Stempel, Snodgrass, and Hilgemeyer.

It was confirmed on November 2 when Van Doren said to the Committee that "I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception. The fact that I too was very much deceived cannot keep me from being the principal victim of that deception, because I was its principal symbol."