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"My name," began the husky-voiced witness, introducing himself like any quiz contestant, "is Robert E. Kintner. I am president of the National Broadcasting Company."
There should have been excitement in the words, for a network president is a man who has the power to bring to 130 million Americans the world's history as it happens, to teach them cooking or astrophysics, to expound the word of many religions, to give them Shakespeare, O'Neill and Wyatt Earp—and Twenty One. But as he faced the House subcommittee last week, the man who was personally responsible for bringing most of its quiz shows to NBC ("And I'm not ashamed of it") reflected little of television's potential magic. The same witness chair had been occupied for four days by a tawdry succession of fixers and schlockmeisters, corrupters and corrupted (see above). Bob Kintner had gone to Washington with the difficult task of showing that 1) NBC had done everything that could be reasonably expected to prevent or detect fraud on the quiz shows, and 2) the quiz scandals did not reflect a sickness in other areas of television. In 3½ hours of testimony, Kintner notably failed to prove either point.
Kintner said, in effect, that there was nothing wrong with television that a little vigilance and a few ex-FBI men could not take care of. He embodied TV's spirit of business as usual and business above all.
Belated Recognition. Kintner began by giving NBC's official chronology of the Twenty One affair. When Herbert Stempel made his first charges that the show was crooked in September 1957, NBC officials did not report the matter to Kintner or Board Chairman Robert W. Sarnoff, but took Producer Dan Enright's assurance that Stempel was lying. A year later, when the Stempel charges finally broke in the press, NBC still took the word of Producer Enright and his partner, Jack Barry, relying largely on their "excellent reputation"; Kintner was not asked and did not tell the committee that, at the time, he failed to listen to a taped recording of a conversation between Stempel and Enright that made their collusion unmistakable to any normally skeptical man (TIME, Sept. 15, 1958). Only later, after other charges became public and a grand jury began to investigate, was the show taken under direct NBC control, and finally dropped. Said Kintner: "By hindsight, we recognize we should have dug deeper."
Then Kintner added the remarkable claim that NBC had got its "first established evidence of quiz-show rigging" only through the Washington hearings, and that he had not known about any kind of rigging until mid-August 1958.
Committee Counsel Robert W. Lishman: In that respect, Mr. Kintner, I would like to call your attention to an article which appeared in TIME Magazine April 22, 1957, more than a year before this time. The opening sentence indicates its tenor: "Are the quiz shows rigged?" It points out with reference to a number of quiz shows that there was a great deal of suspicion. It concludes: "The producers seem to be able to control virtually everything except their own fears of losing their audience."
Kintner: Mr. Lishman, I did not read the article.