Charles Van Doren and the Rigged Quiz Show That Fooled America

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Charles Van Doren was a Columbia University English professor from a family of Pulitzer Prize winning writers. In November 1959 he sat before Congress on national television and confessed to being the face of the biggest fraud in early broadcasting. This episode explains how he got there. A 1954 Supreme Court ruling let networks hand out large cash prizes, and NBC launched Twenty-One in September 1956. The first honest episode was a disaster of sweating contestants and dead air, sponsor Geritol was furious, and the producers decided to script the show.

Producer Dan Enright wanted a hero, and reigning champion Herb Stempel did not fit the part. Van Doren, who had auditioned for Tic-Tac-Dough, did. Stempel was ordered to lose on December 5, 1956, and his resentment began the unraveling that a grand jury and a House subcommittee finished. The episode follows Van Doren from adored celebrity to decades of silence, and shows how his ruin rewrote the law and changed who controls television programming.

• Stempel, who had won 69,500 dollars, was told to miss a question about the 1955 Best Picture Oscar by answering On the Waterfront instead of Marty, one of his favorite films.
• Contestant James Snodgrass mailed himself the questions and answers by registered mail before his episodes aired, supplying the postmarked proof Stempel lacked.
• Rigging a quiz show was not yet illegal, so the real legal danger for contestants was perjury before the New York grand jury in 1958.
• Van Doren lost his job on the Today show, resigned from Columbia, worked as an editor at Encyclopedia Britannica until 1982, and refused 100,000 dollars to consult on the 1994 film Quiz Show.
• In 1960 President Eisenhower signed an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934 that made fixing televised contests of knowledge illegal.