(3 of 3)
When the grand jury subpoenaed Kirsten Falke to testify, Producer Felsher urged her to lie. Felsher, who was fired by NBC only last week, told the Congressmen that he urged about 30 former contestants to lie to the grand jury, as he himself had done, naturally under oath (later Felsher returned to the grand jury, told the truth). How many of the nighttime programs of Tic Tac Dough were rigged? Answered Felsher: about 75%—and he had a simple explanation: "I was trying to put together an exciting show, and I never did feel that there was anything terribly wrong about it."
In such an atmosphere, fixing was epidemic. On CBS, testified a network spokesman, Dotto went crooked. So did For Love or Money (whose "dancing decimal machine" was rigged to chisel down the contestants' possible winnings). After a contestant reported he had been fed an answer, CBS even began to investigate The $64,000 Challenge (which was owned by a packaging firm controlled by CBS-TV President Lou Cowan). The network chucked all three shows between August 1958 and last January. But it has continued to ride with Name That Tune, though it publicly admits that some contestants are asked to identify songs that they have been tested on before.
"Deception Is of Value." As the confessions kept coming, the networks took the position that they had been deceived along with the public. "A breach of public faith!" thundered NBC. "This deception strikes at the integrity of the networks," echoed CBS. (Dan Enright did not agree. Said he: "A degree of deception is of considerable value in producing shows.") But the networks could not deny that they had been less than thorough in investigating the charges when they were first made; even as late as last October, when NBC took over Dan Enright's and M.C. Jack Barry's supervision of the shows, NBC said that it was doing it so that the partners, in their own words, could "devote more time to disproving the unfounded charges against our integrity."*
With everyone still awaiting word from Van Doren, one subcommittee member, California Democrat John Moss, summed up the practice of the quiz show operators: "It is a perfect illustration of their lack of morality, a perfect illustration of their lack of ethics. They are perfectly willing to corrupt." It was also clear that a great many contestants, drawn from everyday America and tempted by small fortunes and big publicity, had been perfectly willing to be corrupted.
* In May 1957, soon after Charlie Van Doren's fabled splurge, NBC had bought out their packaging firm, Barry and Enright Productions, Inc., for $2,200,000, also gave them long-term contracts as producers at $100,000 each per year. Fortnight ago, burned by the investigation, Barry and Enright closed out the contracts for a lump settlement of $26,000.