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Other Frauds. More significant even than the question of the networks' culpability or negligence about the quiz shows was the question of what the whole affair suggests about the TV industry in general. "It could happen to anyone," says NBC Board Chairman Robert Sarnoff. But it seems plain that the special TV environment, with its relentless pressure for higher ratings and higher profits, was at least in part to blame. Newly aroused by the Washington hearings, critics of television began looking for other kinds of coaxial fraud.
They did not have far to search, for television is shot through with major and minor forms of corruption. There are the phony commercials: the foam in the beer glass, which is often really soap suds; the home permanent on the pretty model, often the result of a two-hour session with a hairdresser. Last week, the FTC issued a complaint against Libby-Owens-Ford Glass Co. and General Motors, charging "camera trickery" on commercials, e.g., pictures were taken through open windows that were supposedly taken through clear plate glass. There is the blatant, organized sale of plugs, i.e., set under-the-counter fees for mentioning firms or products on the air (the field in which the devious schlockmeister works). There is TV's own form of "payola," which means that relatively few songs are played on the air unless the song publisher is willing to share performance fees with a production official. Not all these practices are confined to TV. But nowhere else have glossy Madison Avenue hucksterism and clamorous carnival showmanship combined with such crass results.
Headless Giant. Yet the trouble lies even deeper than that. The quiz hearings served to focus a general discontent with TV, a widespread feeling that its masters do not allow the medium to live up to its great promise. In defense, TV's top men could and did say that they have enormous problems, chief among them the vast and amorphous audience. Where a newspaper or magazine can address itself to one kind of audience, television must play to all.
Nevertheless, TV could not escape the charges of mediocre imagination, too much shoddy programing, too much imitation of established formulas (there are some 35 cowpokes on TV this year, 62 gumshoes). Such is the dearth of quality that the considerable number of competent shows are often gratefully hailed as excellent, and the handful of really first-rate programs are greeted as virtually miraculous.
Who is to blame? In trying to answer that question, critics are baffled by the fact that television is a shapeless giant that often seems to be functioning without a head.