Truth and consequences

The first reality star of television died this year, almost unnoticed.  Charles Van Doren was 93 and had lived mostly out of the media glare for half a century.  Today people know of him mostly from Robert Redford's 1994 film Quiz Show.  For a few months in the 1950s he was America's idea of a public intellectual.  He seemed to know absolutely everything and proved it each week on a game show called Twenty-one (think Jeopardy! with more nail-biting suspense and an isolation booth).  He earned vast amounts of 1950s money and appeared on the cover of Time before his run finally ended, and then NBC hired him to read poetry on The Today Show (think The View with less squabbling and a chimp).  He was young, handsome, WASPy and smart, and his parents and uncle wrote the kind of books noticed by the Pulitzer committee as well as the Book-of-the-Month Club.

It was all a lie.  The producers regularly supplied him with the answers, as they did other contestants for as long as America tuned in to see them.  When the news broke, it was so shocking that a Congressional investigation ensued; legislation to regulate game shows was even suggested.  Nothing came of it because, after all, it was just entertainment.  But Van Doren was finished, fired by both NBC and Columbia University, where he taught literature.   He wrote several books and a New Yorker article about his involvement in the fraud.

America was enraged in proportion to its former love affair, angry at having been conned.  Unfortunately,  America failed to hand its anger down to its children and grandchildren, millions of whom voted for a far more sinister TV faker.  In the film, Congressional investigator Richard Goodwin says ruefully, "We thought we were going to get television.  But television got us."  So it did.