Why is it illegal to have a quiz show which gives out the answers ?
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Mandrake1979 — 14 years ago(December 18, 2011 01:41 PM)
It could be a civil matter I am not really sure on that count. I am thinking that all the contestants would be able to create a joint action against the makers of the show but only the negative publicity would have any real affect. Basically what happened to the show when it was accused of cheating the makers lost their cash cow and moved onto the next project.
On the contract side if any contestant had signed a contract about 'the network reserved the right' it would only apply if the contestant cheated, if it was the network that cheated then any good lawyer would make that contract null and void. -
TreeHuggerKyle — 13 years ago(May 20, 2012 01:16 PM)
Perjury is only an issue if they lie under oath in a court of law. So once they were in front of the Grand Jury, then yes, they perjured themselves. I think the question is why it was illegal for them to do it in the first place.
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BullSchmidt — 13 years ago(May 01, 2012 07:00 AM)
I don't understand why this whole case needed to go in front of Congress. They weren't breaking any laws.
You're right, running a rigged quiz show was not illegal at that time. Once it was revealed that quiz shows were often rigged, the general public reacted with outrage. Thus the Congressional hearings, to determine whether legislation was necessary to prevent it from happening again, and if so, what form that legislation should take.
To put it another way, the public found out what was going on, screamed "there oughta be a law against that," and Congress did exactly what it was supposed to do. Congress has to be able to gather information and inform itself in order to legislate effectively; that's why it can hold hearings, subpoena witnesses, etc.
Lying to a Congressional investigation is illegal and was back then. Several of the witnesses who tried to cover things up during their testimony ended up with perjury convictions. -
Doc80 — 13 years ago(June 09, 2012 08:26 AM)
Right, it wasn't illegal to rig a game show at that time. If it was, then guys like Dan Enright would have ended up in jail.
Even if a game show tried to do what twenty-one did back then, I still don't think anyone would actually go to jail nowadays. -
bron-tay — 12 years ago(October 03, 2013 09:31 PM)
I agree wholeheartedly, but it seems the first person to sniff around the scandal was a prosecutor, not an investigative reporter.
So it got prosecuted, not simply blown wide open.Please put some dashes above your sig line so I won't think it's part of your dumb post. -
MyDarkStar — 12 years ago(November 23, 2013 11:35 AM)
Which makes me ask : Didn't HE have something better to do than sniff around a game show ? The guy went to Harvard and was working for a Senator. I would think he could think of something better to do than dedicate his time to something a little more significant than this.
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kswiss89 — 12 years ago(December 12, 2013 03:50 AM)
Considering how big of a deal it became, you could say he didn't have anything better to do. Given the coverage and everything that became of the scandal it definitely was the thing that made him famous. The trial was his claim to fame, regardless of how nonsensical it seems for him to pursue it now.
"Even though I'm no more than a monster - don't I, too, have the right to live? " -Oh Dae-Su -
Franny25 — 12 years ago(December 23, 2013 07:45 PM)
Television was viewed differently back then. There was more of "the airwaves belong to the public" attitude and integrity was expected of those who used them. Perhaps it was because it was still a fairly new medium and the fact that people trusted it - that may have been the underlying motivation for the original interest. Congress did have oversight over it and until you complete your investigation you don't know what it might uncover. There very well may have been crimes committed in the furtherance of the cheating (bribery, extortion, fraud, threats, regulatory infractions, etc.) - I can't remember now but if perjury occurred before the grand jury then obviously that was a crime.
And don't forget that people did lie to Congress. Sometimes even if you can't prove a crime occurred (that is, we can't prove everyone who was in on it and to what extent) it's still important to the public interest to put on the record what people claim happened. Sometimes all you can do is lay it out and let the public decide who they think lied or was dishonest. The scandal opened the eyes of the public to the level of deception being foisted on the American people by various powerful entities. It also put a lie to a lot of people who were tarnished by it all - some to greater degrees than others.
This is one of my favorite films. Being familiar with Goodwin I thought Morrow was wonderful in the role. For me these movies about ethical dilemmas create more powerful drama than any other. Shattered Glass comes to mind as another favorite.
A poster asked for most powerful scenes. For me they were when Goodwin is playing poker with Van Doren and he tells him "I know you're lying," when Goodwin is confronted by his wife about how his feelings for Van Doren were allowing him to escape being confronted with a subpoena versus his treatment of Stempel, and when Van Doren tells his dad he cheated and his dad reminds him "your name is my name."
The picnic at the van Doren home in Connecticut is wonderfully played out showing the obvious tension and dysfunctional relationship between Charles and his father which has become invisible to family members and so clear to Goodwin witnessing it as an objective outsider. -
kentor404 — 10 years ago(May 30, 2015 09:12 PM)
You seem to be missing at least a couple angles on the situation. As someone above explained, the losing contestants and possibly advertisers were being defrauded if they weren't in on the scheme. If you went on a game show, or to a casino or anything similar, and you found out later the game had been rigged so certain people would win and those "certain people" did not include you, I'm fairly certain that you or many people in that situation, and even many others who were not necessarily themselves defrauded, would feel cheated and demand something be done about it.
That happened in this instance. A local grand jury was initially called to investigate charges of conspiracy to defraud, and as it turned out, some witnesses called before that grand jury lied under oath. That's a perfect recipe for the original "sin" no longer being the issue, now perjury becomes the issue and the story tends to get much bigger than it would have otherwise.
It's somewhat analogous to the 1919 Black Sox scandal, wherein certain Chicago White Sox players conspired to "throw" the World Series in exchange for cash from underworld figures, who in turn stood to make a lot of money by knowing in advance who was going to win. You could say it's "only a game", but the problem is the conspiracy is a fraud perpetrated on those who lost money because, unbeknownst to them, the games were not on the "up and up". All the law needed for jurisdiction was one victim of the fraud, which they found in the form of Charles C. Nims, a man who legally bet on the White Sox to win without knowing the series was fixed. Mr. Nims represented the many thousands who lost money or were otherwise defrauded because they were unaware of the fix.
Congress got involved in the TV game show conspiracy because, as explained in the movie, they have oversight in TV and radio via their responsibilities concerning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the regulation of interstate commerce. The federal government, with oversight by congress, has extensive regulatory authority when it comes to broadcast media, including but not limited to game shows. Certainly an ongoing conspiracy wherein people were being defrauded out of possible winnings by a rigged format of which they were not aware would fall well within their investigative purview. -
smoko — 10 years ago(May 31, 2015 01:03 AM)
@MyDarkStar
Didn't HE have something better to do than sniff around a game show ?
Dick Goodwin: "We're gonna put television on trial. Television. Everybody in the country will know about it."
Chairman: "The networks? The pharmaceutical industry? Cosmetics? That's big game, son. You don't go huntin' in your underwear."
It was so significant that the Chairman warned Goodwin to be careful. -
jimmelnh — 12 years ago(November 23, 2013 06:10 AM)
I also can't believe that Congress didn't have better things to do with their time than waste it on this nonsense. It just goes to show that Congress was just as corrupt and worthless then as it is today. This whole case is more an implication of the stupidity of the American people. Anyone who believes television, including what passes for news, is anything but entertainment is an idiot. What is really pathetic is the fact that it would probably be easier to pull this off today, with the dumbed down American sheople, than it was 60 some odd years ago. Look how many gullible people believe "reality" TV programs today are real. They don't call it "programming" for nothing.
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MrAleisterCrowley — 12 years ago(December 28, 2013 02:42 PM)
Exactly. "Reality" television is obviously 99% scripting, editing, and behind the scenes maneuvering. I think the fifties were an especially idiotic time in America. We seemed to indulge in a lot of naive fantasies then about who we were (I was not born until the seventies so I am repeating things I heard over the years from parents and other relatives who lived through the fifties I don't really even remember the seventies). The U.S. was full of moral righteousness as the Cold War took off in earnest, and I think that was the point Redford was trying to make with Sputnik (chronologically incorrect) placed at the beginning of this film America thought of itself as the "morally superior" culture, so the thought that the golden-boy son of a very prominent American intellectual family could participate in such a flamboyant fleecing of the American public was shocking to the very, very, very naive average American of the fifties. The idea that television, like movies have always been, is first and foremost show business with all that term implies was lost on the medium's initial audience.
Yes, now it seems disgustingly absurd that CONGRESS wasted time on fcking television game shows. I also remember the Tipper Gore nonsense in the 1980s, which was also an appalling misuse of gov. time and resources (during the AIDs crisis and a homelessness crisis among many other issues) to attack and censor rock musicians. Even John Denver testified. Get a bunch of hysterical Americans screaming at their congressmen with faux moral outrage (hysterical suburban housewives in the 1980s who never noticed that popular music, since like the days of Cole Porter in the 1920s, can have raunchy-azz lyrics) and congress will embarrass itself doing just this sort of thing.
"I love those redheads!" (Wooderson, Dazed and Confused, 1993)