Why Was This Such A Scandal?

It was really a stupid game show. Why have the contestants in a sound-proof booth not knowing the other's score? It must have been very boring. What happens if no contestant gets to 21? Why have the target 21 anyway? The questions did not seem to be scored by difficulty. They just ask you to gamble with no idea how hard or easy the questions are. And they maybe insanely difficult or trivially easy. It's a dishonest and silly idea even if they didn't rig it, IMO. The time constraints seemed pretty lax, too. How would they fit it into a half hour with commercials & be assured anyone got to 21 regularly LIVE with no time left unless it's rigged?

All this is true, but a congressional investigation?

I see this as a case for an investigative journalist, not a federal prosecutor.


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Please put some dashes above your sig line so I won't think it's part of your dumb post.

I don't know if I buy the innocent time thing at least for the men. Maybe the Housewives who watched the show believed in it...but I think the grownups of that generation who had grown up through the depression, served in a war, and were working had no illusions of innocence. And for people who lived in the South...the Jim Crow Laws disabused anybody of how innocent that era was. I do agree it was defrauding the innocent contestant that concerns me...but everybody else shouldn't have cared...there were worse things going on in America and the world.

This all happened before my time but I am SO glad that Congress investigated these rigged game shows! Such a terrible thing to do to the American public! Oh, it must have been so rough for the people who must have been forced to sit through and watch all those episodes of 21 and Dotto and then learn the shows were rigged! They must have cried all night afterwards. Whatever would I do today if Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or The Price is Right was rigged? Oh, I would be SO hurt by that... honest game shows are ESSENTIAL to my well-being. SO glad that Congress had its priorities in order. Never mind things like poverty, unemployment, education, health care, national defense... those are all minor issues compared to game shows! Glad that the Congress spent its time forcing people to testify and protected the American public from such a terrible crime.


>this was all sarcasm, in case you didn't know by now. I don't watch game shows with any regularity and if I did, I wouldn't be calling my Congressman about it<

Yes, it was a big scandal due to the popularity of prime-time big money game shows. If the ratings were low, it wouldn't have blown up like this. There was also a lot of money involved here for the networks and sponsors.

In the movie they make a brief reference to The $64,000 Question early on, but otherwise the film revolves around Twenty-One. In reality there were several very popular game shows back then that turned out to be rigged, like The $64,00 Question, The $64,000 Challenege, Dotto and Twenty-One. Van Doren became the poster boy for the scandal because he comes from such a prominent family (both his uncle and father won the Pulitzer Prize, his father still has a reputation at Columbia for being one of the best teachers ever his mother was an acclaimed writer, his brother became a very well-respected professor), and he had made it to the cover of Time magazine.

I don't usually like making analogies, because they never do fit quite right, but if someone is wondering why it was such a big deal, I'd compare it to the bicycle doping scandal with Lance Armstrong taking the brunt of it and having the further fall form grace as he had the highest profile. A lot of people were cheating, there was a lot of money involved from sponsors who probably knew better, Lance shot to extraordinary fame, so many symptoms were there that it was fake but the vast majority wanted to believe the narrative they were being fed, and then it all crashed and burned. Even with that scandal some people say "I don't get why it's such a big deal?".