The Rigged Society
Rosenberg, Jay Bentham and Bernard
By now there is a whole repertoire of responses to the quiz fix. One hears a muffled mea cu/pa from the fixed and the fixers; some simulate indignation or cry on cue, while others...
...It has had a negative effect on Revlon stock and might even harm Revlon sales...
...The networks got theirs in the form of higher income produced by successful shows...
...Within its own framework, this interpretation of the fix is perfectly logical...
...You had to be a psychopathic character, a petty sneak thief or an ambitious Congressman, probably owning a piece of the industry yourself, to louse it all up...
...Only after defeat does he achieve true heroic stature...
...Their cynicism is practical...
...There were no economic liabilities to anyone connected with the operation...
...The prolonged contest between an idiot savant and a series of better-educated contestants was a master-stroke that by itself would justify the whole enterprise...
...And those who do not profit can see in Van Doren's failure an attempt, almost successful, to beat the system...
...Its lessons will not be lost...
...The essence of this secret is that they have mastered the sales, public rela...
...The scandalous behavior of Errol Flynn, Lana Turner, Ingrid Bergman and Dick Nixon has not resulted in any loss of popularity 'for these public figures...
...But the kind of corruption we have lately been witnessing testifies to something even more damning about our society: that an increasing...
...The Second World War and its aftermath have changed all that...
...It stirs up mess after mess, and still further investigation which may not be easy to stop, although the consequences could be harmful to any number of ad men, journalists, members of regulatory commissions, public relations counselors and their clients...
...Contemporary society itself is widely assumed to be fixed...
...To the "Old - Pros" on Ad Alley it's all hocus-pocus...
...At the simplest level Van Doren personifies a fundamental, though peculiar, American attitude which fuses the exaltation of money as an ultimate value with deep skepticism about the possibility of acquring much of it by work...
...Unhappily for all concerned, the framework is inadequate...
...In 1952 Nixon nearly got dumped from the GOP ticket because it was still uncertain how much a sinner could brazen it out after his misdeeds had been publicized...
...In spite of an untoward interruption, the quiz show was a consummate example of program control designed to yield maximum ratings...
...but we suggest that each revelation of TV deceit, each announcement of corruption in government, each discovery that municipal inspectors connive in filching New York's poor of their proper weight of meat, must lead to a deeper social malaise, a profounder sense of je m'en fiche, a more crippling kind of cynicism...
...None of the principals was damaged by the fix until it was revealed...
...One hears a muffled mea cu/pa from the fixed and the fixers...
...Let no one tell the Revson brothers that a rating is to be sneezed at...
...The cobbler, the professor, the teamster, the soldier, the subteenager— each in possession of nonconvertible knowledge yoked to a fabulous memory, an unusual hobby or an anomolous interest—could outwit the professional money man, and could do so without the routine backstabbing of business...
...Senator Truman exposed war-time corruption and President Truman suffered the inroads of corruption...
...He recognizes his fatal flaw, comes to terms with it and surmounts the defeat that has been inflicted upon him...
...General Eisenhower who opted for such cleanliness as only a hound's tooth knew, suffered Dick Nixon's slip in his first campaign and for a short time had to resume a modicum of policymaking with the disgrace of Sherman Adams...
...Similar benefits accrued to other sponsors, off whom ad agencies were better able to batten than ever before...
...Rehearsed quizes merely served to guarantee that there would be no great intrusion on the high drama that TV evokes to keep men from being left alone with their daily existence...
...And the sponsor got his rating...
...Since televiewers are loath to switch channels (this is the age in which Bell Telephone offers you "a beautiful way to save steps" by installing a phone in every room) they continued to watch other programs on the same station after their favorite quiz, thereby strengthening the preferred network's total line-up...
...So that even if you condemn him, it is hard not to feel some compassion for Van Doren...
...After all, it is not so extraordinary for a crook to perjure himself, be caught in the perjury, and finally confess and pay for his sins...
...The quizes did accomplish their purpose: to deliver high volume advertising at relatively low cost...
...Besides, from this angle of vision, he did not entirely fail...
...By now there is a whole repertoire of responses to the quiz fix...
...He had a merry ride, has salvaged some fixed assets, and has been officially assured that his future will be brilliant...
...It should be of solace to Van Doren that Nixon's "Checkers" speech came exactly seven years, almost to the day, before the quiz scandal...
...This is why the rite of public confession increasingly creates sympathy and success—for those who confess totally, dramatically and on time...
...tions, personality, administrative and finanical tricks of "beating the system" while publicly extolling its virtues...
...By contrast, Europeans have tended to be cynical about public life and more insistent on personal honor, the integrity of one's private life...
...That the issue transcends money is evident wherever people express shock and disbelief when confronted with the guilt of their popular TV heroes...
...What we have been seeing these past few months is but a sympton of this terrible fact...
...None of this precludes a vicarious, and equally common, enjoyment of the fruits of that fraud once it has been exposed...
...For some years, Americans have seen their public figures tarnished with the same sins many of them would like the opportunity to enjoy...
...Van Doren, when he took flight into the New England wilderness, there to search his soul—aided by a letter from a simple old woman (not to say legal and public relations counsel)—had a spiritual experience which enabled him to see the error of his ways, to make a clean breast of sins that were already documented, and thus to emerge as a cleaner, newer, even reborn and transfigured hero, worthy of the stentorian benediction his interrogators conferred upon him...
...Charles Van Doren was forced to act out a role as old as civilization itself...
...not after the spectacular increase in Revlon sales and in the price of Revlon stock...
...Van Doren was one of the "unfortunate suckers" who got caught up in the complexities of an ubiquitous process...
...These appeals and identifications have made symbols of those who were allowed to enjoy a certain profit in exchange for the interest they focussed on goods manufactured by advertisers who paid them...
...Everyone can identify with Van Doren...
...One telecast later the misgivings of Eisenhower's advisers were proved to be unwarranted...
...On the face of things, this may seem true...
...One contestant, taking more time before the House Oversight Committee than he had on TV, viewed the congressional inquiry as an occasion "to empty his soul...
...It had to do much more meaningfully with the role he had cast for himself and into which he was cast by Congressional investigators and other witnesses who left him no choice but to confess...
...They know better...
...Business for everybody would have been better without the exposes...
...For the popularity of such shows was based on a well-nigh universal appeal: that those who were economically unequipped, the underdogs and the over-specialized could beat the system...
...Who, being blameless, can cast the first stone...
...What they know—and Public Relations will eventually make it real for us all— is that until a disturbed young man upset the apple cart everyone was happy, that show biz is show biz, that illusion is its essence, that no crime was committed, and that we were all the richer in contentment or cash before this hullabaloo started...
...Among those who are deprived of a share in the institutionalized fraud, there is likely to be a feeling of resentment, coupled with cynicism and delight in the downfall of the upperfrauds...
...Else the quiz scandal, and most especially the confessions, would have failed to attain their full dramatic impact...
...THE CONTINUOUS public exposure of our heroes may well mean that sin has become more tolerable not only in private but in public life...
...But it would be a mistake to suppose that the process we have described here is a self-contained one, a sort of equilibrium between deceit and revelation which might, to parody Marx, be described as Fix-Confession-Fix...
...some simulate indignation or cry on cue, while others demonstrate their know-how more creatively...
...The scandal has cast a suspicion of executive incompetence upon the top officials of CBS and NBC who presumably did not know what took place in their own shops...
...The network doors opened wide for them and for their retainers, to whom high-paying, prestigious positions were suddenly available...
...THERE IS MORE to the story...
...It is not only that corruption is warp and woof of our society: that is an old story...
...So do at least two witnesses, although one could bring himself to say so only from his sanctuary in Mexico...
...As for the contestants, who will deny that, by and large, they were well paid for their work...
...Van Doren has helped to bury it...
...The audience got its kicks...
...At the same time, those on or near the top are privately willing to concede that public life is a fraud, but they hug to themselves and entre noun, among the few intimates in their milieu, the pleasantly guilty secret...
...The fix produced drama, excitement, battles, ties, cliff hangings and colossal audiences...
...Van Doren's Dramatic Ritual did not reach its climax during his superb performance in the isolation booth, nor yet on the stand as a penitent...
...FOR SOME YEARS it has been the writers' conviction that in modern American society there is a secret understanding, shared by almost everyone and obliquely expressed by the mass media only in tabloids and expose magazines, that all public life and all public institutions are a fraud...
...To the extent that we identify with such figures we are likely to make fewer demands upon ourselves—and upon each other...
...All his countrymen, and not they alone, understand the temptations inherent in fame, fortune, excitement and adulation...
...Packagers and producers were able to sell their wares for fabulous sums —and for capital gains...
...The process might have taxed a Zen Master's patience...
...Since he was trapped and given the opportunity to confess, we can now endow him with the power of confessing for the rest of us the sins which we cannot publicly confess...
...Once upon a time, in the U. S. and even in Hollywood, the public revelation of sin could lead to banishment...
...He misrepresented himself as a mnemonically superlative symbol of the disinterested quest for truth when, in fact, he was a person with the same faulty memory we all have, regardless of education...
...The Protestant Ethic has been dead for some time...
...This reaction can only be understood as a by-product of the psychological identification so skillfully fostered by the producers of successful quiz shows...
...In classical Greek tragedy, the hero is defeated after challenging the gods—not by the gods but by a weakness in himself...
...ly large number of people are doomed to "work" which they know to be rotten, wasteful, needless, soul-destroying...
...From this point of view, irresponsible politicians forced at least a hundred persons to perjure themselves and to suffer possible reprisals...
...It makes people sick to have to live in a sick society and cry health...
...Charles Van Doren, the supreme symbol of them all, has asserted that this greatest crime consisted in permitting himself to be a symbol...
...The quiz fix, then, stands as a symbol for that much greater fix which nearly everyone admits to...
...So WHO GOT HURT, Madison Avenue wants to know...
...In a symbolic sense he dramatizes the confession of everyone who profits from the operations of a fixed society...
...It is in rising to these complex emotions that the scandal sheet and the yellow press thrive...
...Americans and Englishmen have traditionally held to the view that public life should be kept clean, that a man's public reputation is paramount no matter what his private vices may be...
Vol. 7 • January 1960 • No. 1
