The $64,000 Question

Last night I caught the last half-hour or so of Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show, that hard-hitting topical movie that blew the lid off the corrupt game show industry…of the late 1950s. Googling around afterwards led me to Ken Auletta’s New Yorker article on the film, reprinted on his site, in which he asks, “Thirty-five years after the quiz-show scandal, a group of network executives consider the question: Is television still cheating?”

The whole thing is well worth reading, starting with this:

TELEVISION has always danced with the show-business devil. The need for pictures can distort judgments about what is news and what is not, what is best for the viewer and what is not. And the success of a show like “Victory at Sea” owed much to sometimes soaring, sometimes sombre background music. Before People and “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” Edward R. Murrow was the host of the weekly “Person to Person,” asking his celebrity guests, “What was the biggest thrill of your career?” The search for likable personalities and attractive faces yielded first Charles Van Doren on “Twenty-One” and then, years later, Phyllis George as co-host of the “CBS Morning News.” The most successful television show in history–“60 Minutes”–owes much to tenacious reporting and good writing and much to entertainment values as well. “In a way, ’60 Minutes’ is a Western,” the late esteemed CBS producer Burton Benjamin declared in 1987. “It began with two guys in the white hats–Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner–pursuing the black hats and prevailing. The black hats were thieves, rip-off artists, dishonest politicians, corporations involved in hanky-panky, labor unions that were doing some unpleasant things, and so forth. ’60 Minutes’ rarely, if ever, dealt with matters like arms control or the budget deficit. It dealt with ‘stories’ and good guys and bad guys most of the time.”

Television’s greatest distortions may occur on the talk shows. “It’s unfortunate, in a way, what the talk shows and the talk-show culture . . . have done to the business of writing,” the writer Wendy Kaminer said on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s excellent documentary “Talk Television” earlier this year. “You can’t write a serious book anymore. Anybody who writes a nonfiction book that has any kind of social criticism or political commentary has to be prepared to go on talk shows, and you have to be able to reduce the book to a series of twenty- or thirty-second sound bites.” The need to compress answers for reasons of time and drama, coupled with news-discussion shows like “The McLaughlin Group” and “Crossfire” and “Capital Gang,” raises the decibel level of American politics. The common and false presumption of these shows is that most public-policy questions fall into a liberal or a conservative box–into yes-or-no answers.

Distortion inevitably creeps into news. Presidential candidates are reduced to an average sound bite of about eight seconds on the evening news. Serious producers and correspondents, sometimes without realizing it, encourage those they interview to rush–to give them a sharp sound bite. “Ratings are the scorecard,” David Bartlett, the president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, told an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Forum last January. Commenting on the outburst of tabloidlike “magazine” shows, the current NBC News president, Andrew Lack, told the same forum, “We got too good at producing the hooks, and unfortunately the audience took the bait.”

Ahh, those innocent 1990s, before the audience had a way to talk back.