Show Business: The Ultimate Responsibility

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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.

Representative John B. Bennett, Michigan Republican (later): I am sure that with the efficient organization that NBC has, somebody in the top echelon knew about the story. To let those stories go by the board and then to wait until a contestant came out with a charge, and then dismiss that on the basis of representations to you by the producers, just seems to me not to be the right way to get at the facts.

What Is an Inkling? By way of belated remedies, Kintner reported that NBC had got affidavits from quiz producers and contestants that they were not cheating, and told of the formation of a kind of network secret police, composed in part of ex-FBI agents, to keep an eye on the shows. One result, announced by Kintner to the committee: the discovery of kickbacks from contestants to two employees of Treasure Hunt, who were promptly fired. But the show, presumably more closely policed, continues on the air. To the committee Kintner also proposed legislation making cheating on quiz shows a federal offense. But Kintner insisted that he would not “eliminate this whole category of programing. [Quiz shows] can be enjoyable and instructive without any fakery.”

The subcommittee was not impressed. Commented Illinois Democrat Peter F. Mack Jr. later: “I had the feeling that the president of NBC did not feel any responsibility for shows carried over that network; that if the producer was out of line or an advertising agency, that he felt he was in the clear.”

Testifying next day, CBS President Frank Stanton disagreed with Kintner, repeated his conviction that the danger of fraud on big-money quiz shows will always be too great no matter how carefully they are policed. Witness Stanton, who banned quiz shows from CBS three weeks ago, was against federal legislation, felt the networks themselves must enforce honesty in their entertainment as well as in commercials. But like Kintner, Stanton insisted that he and his network had been duped by the quiz producers; when “gossip about quiz shows” reached him, Stanton accepted the assurance of “our television network people” that the shows were honest. Wasn’t it remarkable, asked Counsel Lishman, that Stanton had no inkling of what was going on? Replied Stanton: “I wouldn’t say that I did not have any inkling, but an inkling is a long way from something on which you can take affirmative action.” Like Kintner, Stanton denied to Counsel Lishman that he had read the TIME story about quiz rigging in 1957.

Stanton: It so happened at the time that article was published I was on a trip out of the country . . . It may have been discussed; I don’t know.

Lishman: Could you explain why no inquiry was really made into the matter at that time?

Stanton: It is easy now to read that article and say, “My gosh, why didn’t we do something about it?” [But] this is the same publication that is fighting for advertiser dollars the same as we are . . . I think you have to realize that these are competitors who are throwing the stones. The management of the publication that ran that article is the licensee of four affiliates of the networks that were carrying those programs. The same management that was privy to the information in that article continued to carry the programs that were being fed to them.

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.

What Is a Network? Viewers who hear the familiar NBC chimes and see the familiar linked initials are apt to think of “the network” as a solid entity. But few know what a network really is. Strictly speaking, as Bob Kintner puts it, it is “programs and a lot of telephone wire.” The wire (44,000 miles, rented from A.T.&T. at $17.4 million a year) loosely holds together NBC’s five wholly owned stations (by FCC ruling, no individual or corporation may own more than seven radio or TV outlets), plus 207 independently owned affiliates with which NBC has contracts to furnish a certain number of programs. The network’s 165 cameras in 31 Manhattan and Hollywood studios, its 6,500 employees, its fluctuating horde of performers, directors and writers provide NBC’s share of the U.S. televiewing audience with up to 140 hours of programing weekly. Theoretically, all this goes on in the “public interest, convenience or necessity” under three-year FCC licenses (granted to individual stations, not to the network as a whole).

But the tables of organization do not show, the rented cable cannot encompass, the reality of television, which is an ever-fluctuating relationship between three powers: network officialdom, sponsors and their advertising agencies, and the program packagers.

The Package Business. During the early 1950s, NBC produced 90% of its own shows. But as broadcasting hours stretched out from predawn to long past midnight, the networks gradually turned to outside packagers to fill up the schedule. Partly this was due to pressure from the Justice Department, which in 1956 threatened antitrust action unless the networks gave independent producers a better share of good TV time. More significantly, in cutting back network-originated production 20% between 1956 and 1959, NBC was able to slice its “creative” payroll, slash overhead.

Now the network produces 40% of the shows that light up its channels, compared to 30% for CBS, 5% for ABC. Chief network-produced items: news and sports shows; a scattering of hard-to-sell prestige features (NBC Opera, Project 20); a hard core of moneymakers (The Jack Paar Show, You Bet Your Life); and two quizzes (Dough Re Mi and Concentration), originally developed by Barry & Enright, from whom Kintner bought eight other shows last year for $2,200,000.

Madison Avenue’s top-drawer advertising agencies have followed the trend; five years ago, agencies spawned 10% of all network shows, now also save on overhead by shopping for their clients among the packagers. The ubiquitous package firms range in size from giants, e.g., Revue Productions Inc., dog-wagging tail of the Music Corp. of America, which grossed $38 million on its filmed series (M Squad, Wagon Train) last year, down to one-shot independents, e.g., Jack (Lassie) Wrather. The range is qualitative as well: Independent Robert Saudek has won Emmys and Peabody Awards for Omnibus, while Warner Bros, ground out ephemeral, low-budget shoot-’em-ups.

Highbrow or low slung, virtually all packagers operate with small flexible staffs, hire equipment and actors only as needed, produce completed films or live shows to order. This year some 300 packagers are providing 70% of the regularly scheduled network shows, a fact that to some critics explains many of TV’s ills. With so much programing in the hands of outsiders, networks have little control; every rigged quiz started out as a packaged product. Some cozy alliances have been formed between the nets and packagers: NBC has traditionally catered to M.C.A. products, ABC to Warner’s imitative westerns.

Buying Without Looking. The situation has given rise to a dangerous new breed of editorial irresponsibility: the purchase of shows sight unseen. Last spring, Packager Don Sharpe sold Mr. Lucky to CBS; at the time he had neither cast nor pilot—only a script that was later discarded. Independents can sucker networks into financing even the shabbiest of productions. NBC spent $1,300,000 to bankroll 26 episodes of a dreary filmed comedy called Love and Marriage, managed to get some of its money back only by plopping the show into a favorable time (Mon., 8-8:30 p.m. E.S.T.), and selling it to an advertiser (Noxzema) that had long been panting in the wings for such a time spot. Says onetime (1953-55) NBC President Sylvester L. (“Pat”) Weaver, now chairman of McCann-Erickson International: “The networks today have abdicated to the Hollywood studios and to M.C.A.” Adds McCann-Erickson’s TV Boss C. Terence Clyne: “The networks are not creators or producers; they are editors and purchasers. More than 90% of TV investment is spent on the product of someone else’s creativity.”

But should the packagers be sent packing? Few think so. Tax-haunted Hollywood talents savor the capital-gains advantages of independent production. Adds NBC’s Kintner: “We simply haven’t enough creative brains and personnel to supply all the programs.” Undoubtedly, there should be far more network-produced shows, but the real trouble is not that the networks buy from packagers, but that they do not exercise enough care in what they buy. Example: ABC bought the disastrous Adventures in Paradise from 20th Century-Fox, Alaskans, Bourbon Street Beat and Hawaiian Eye from Warner’s—all without even seeing a pilot film. Says Adman Clyne: “Last spring we went over 200 finished pilots and another hundred ideas. We picked 40, put them on the air. Of those 40, we had confidence in only a dozen or so—and right now, I’d almost guarantee that less than ten will be renewed next fall.”

The ABC Pattern. The packagers could never have risen to their present power were it not for the fact that, as Packager (Screen Gems) Harry Ackerman puts it, “the networks are run by businessmen, not showmen.” Robert Edmonds Kintner, 50, has no quarrel with that situation. A Swarthmore graduate, he started out as a New York Herald Tribune Wall Street reporter in 1933. Son of a Stroudsburg (Pa.) schoolteacher, Cub Kintner, a lean, spectacled Hall-of-Ivy type at the time, at first “didn’t even know where Wall Street was.” But he learned quickly. Though an ardent New Dealer and F.D.R. favorite, able Newsman Kintner developed and retained a high regard for big “business. For five years in Washington, he wrote a column, “The Capital Parade,” in partnership with doom-crying Columnist Joseph Alsop (“Joe tended to destroy the world every time I was out of town”). After a wartime career in Army intelligence and public relations, Bob Kintner became an assistant to Edward J. Noble, who had bought up RCA’s second-string Blue Network in 1943, turned it into ABC. By 1949 brusque, hard-driving Bob Kintner had risen to president.

At ABC, Kintner established his reputation as a skillful and relentless peddler of air wares. He set up the kind of crassly commercial operation so successfully carried on by his successor, Oliver Treyz, after Kintner left in a quarrel with ABC Board Chairman Leonard Goldenson in 1956. Says Kintner now: “If I were still at ABC, I wouldn’t have carried the pattern that far.”

But while he was there, the pattern was clear: crowd-pleasing filmed series, westerns, cops, crime. Kintner feels that he had no alternative if he wanted to save ABC from being crushed by its two bigger competitors. During Kintner’s presidency, ABC added 60 stations, boosted ratings. Kintner signed up Disneyland (for $2,000,000), built a good newscasting staff, including John Daly. He also turned down a chance to sign up The $64,000 Question: “It didn’t seem to make sense—not, I hasten to add, because of moral grounds.”

A Pattern Repeated. Within 48 hours after he quit ABC, Kintner had an offer to join NBC as executive vice president in charge of color coordination (“I didn’t know a damn thing about color”), took charge of TV operations in February 1958. That July he was named president, with a ten-year sliding-scale contract that pays him upwards of $150,000 yearly. Kintner frankly admits that he applied his ABC formula: canned series, westerns, private eyes—plus quizzes. He knifed Wide Wide World, Omnibus, live dramatic shows (including Kraft Theater). Says he: “I had to catch up with front-running CBS.” This year, Kintner can point to a more exciting NBC season, including 200 specials, a weekly drama show (Sunday Showcase), ambitious news coverage on Khrushchev’s visit. (As he had at ABC, Kintner strengthened the NBC news team.) The feeling in the TV industry is that Kintner made his concessions to quality reluctantly, and largely because he was forced to by last year’s torrent of criticism.

Throughout the quiz crisis, husky Bob Kintner (5 ft. 10½ in., 178 lbs.) has maintained, at least outwardly, a massive calm and his usual appearance of a battered but unbowed Buddha. From his apartment on Manhattan’s fashionable Sutton Place (nine rooms, five TV sets), Kintner Cadillacs to work in the RCA Building by 8:10 each morning, spends at least half of his twelve-hour day group-thinking with the network committees populated by his 39 vice presidents. Few below NBC’s top level know Kintner; unlike his chic, gregarious wife Jean, 42, he is not fascinated by his on-camera employees, rarely attends company parties for talent. He keeps a neat, boomerang-shaped desk in an office adorned by a mottled abstract, a wifely gift that he describes as “either an oil geyser or a quiz show going up in smoke.” At night Kintner disposes of dinner with a sandwich and watches TV; he tries to catch every NBC show at least once a year.

Proposed Cures. On the whole, Kintner likes what he sees, has little patience with the various prescriptions that are being suggested to cure TV’s ills. One proposal that Kintner & Co. disposed of convincingly is an industry-appointed TV “czar” with power to enforce balanced programing. “The concept,” said Kintner last week, “is not workable for [television] any more than [for] the newspaper industry or the magazine industry.” Kintner did not add the most plausible argument against the idea: the hard-lobbying broadcasters might hamstring a TV commissioner as easily as they have the FCC.

Kintner and all other top TV men are equally opposed to the far more serious proposals from Pundit Lippmann for an independent TV network, devoted to “civilized entertainment,” and the Christian Science Monitor’s plea for a network modeled roughly on the British Broadcasting Corp. Both the noncommercial BBC and the British commercial ITV probably give a better balance of educational and entertainment programs than do U.S. networks. But as soon as Britain’s commercial channel went into business three years ago, its lower-brow fare began to take the bulk of Britain’s “telly” viewers away from BBC. To meet the competition, BBC itself has lately turned to less cerebral programing, including plenty of U.S. westerns. The fact remains that ITV furnishes a striking example that a TV network can be run for profit without giving the advertiser control of the programs. British sponsors buy time on ITV as advertisers buy space in newspapers, can choose their time of day but have no say about the program that backs up their commercials. Hence, unlike Madison Avenue ad agencies, they cannot dictate the kind of “programing concepts” that, originality-wise, may be nowhere, but that, rating-wise, are surefire. Nor can they exert pettifogging censorship; e.g., on one drama show, Ford ordered the producers to kill a shot of the New York skyline because it highlighted the Chrysler Building.

Clear Responsibility. Kintner, staunch defender of television’s status quo (and of Madison Avenue’s creative contributions), asserts that the U.S. networks themselves can take care of whatever is wrong. But his view of network responsibility is qualified. Says he: “The ultimate responsibility is ours, but the ultimate power has to be the sponsor’s, because without him you couldn’t afford to run a network.”

This view is part of the questionable notion that the main task of a TV program is to get the highest possible number of viewers for the sponsor, thereby achieving the highest possible profits. Every other business also operates for profit, but there is an important difference. Detroit and Hollywood, for instance, sell their own product, and if car sales or movie attendance is poor, the product is changed. In contrast, television as now run does not sell its product, i.e., entertainment; it exists only to sell other wares.

Critics both within and without the industry feel strongly that this need not be so. One solution: pay TV, in which viewers would in effect buy only the programs they want. Another, more immediate notion: network executives with vision must persuade sponsors that high ratings, i.e., the largest possible audience, are not everything. Some sponsors (too few) have, in fact, joined Du Pont (Show of the Month), Hallmark (Hall of Fame) and others in recognizing that quality shows can build a company’s “image” and help sales even if ratings are relatively low. Admen, including McCann-Erickson’s Terry Clyne, point out that the present rating system takes into account only the size of a show’s audience, not its quality. The big case against the tyranny of ratings is that it obscures the network chiefs’ clear moral and esthetic responsibility to be leaders of taste and to fight for the best shows. TV Reporter Mike Wallace articulates a widespread argument when he says: “The networks must have the guts to stand up and say to the sponsor, ‘I’ll run my network; you sell your products. If you want to use us, O.K., but on our terms.’ ”

By week’s end, with the Harris subcommittee hearing temporarily closed, the impact of the scandals seemed to have stirred up an encouraging number of TV viewers; the industry itself was less responsive. “The philosophers can say it’s a good thing all this came into the open,” cracked Robert Kintner. “As president of NBC, I find it hard to be philosophical.”