Here's the biggest irony. In 2002 NBC brought 21 back to TV with Maury Povich as the host. And they did exactly what Martin Scorsese said they would when he said they'd bring the Quiz shows back. This itself happened after the 1999 success of Who Wants to Be A millionaire? where the first contestant to win the grand prize won on a question so easy it wouldn't have made the grade of a 1000 clue on Jeopardy. ( I do think Jeopardy is the outlier to today's Game shows in that respecty but as a fan for 30 years I confess I'm biased)

To them it proved the ultimate point that Scorsese made in the film. No one ever watched any of those shows for the intellect. They only came to watch the money.

I'm somewhat of a cynic and to argue that the Quiz Show scandal was the end of our national innocence is a big reach - the red scare of Joseph McCarthy did a much better number on us then that. This is still one of the best films of the 1990s and arguably the greatest film that Redford has ever directed - everything you say about it from a critical standpoint and historical standpoint is true - but I truly don't believe there's ever really been a huge idea for reality in television. The camera by its definition distorts and it was always doing that. Hollywood was called the Dream factory for a reason and TV just made the dream easier to believe.

I also don't believe it was ever going to be an information machine because I have an equally pragmatic view of television. Television is a business and to be very clear the Quiz Show scandal was just most blatant attempt of the medium to demonstrate that fact.

There's something very telling about Dan Enright's famous statement justifying it: "Well, the sponsors make out, the network makes out, the contestants make more money then they'll ever see and the public is entertained. SO who gets hurt?" You can argue that our moral conscience and our trust in institutions was damaged but corruption had invested every aspect of American life well before that. Politics, journalism, baseball, and esepcially our attitudes towards race and gender were corrupted long before the television was invented and the common facotr is always economics.

i Imagine millions of Americans were heartbroken to learn that the Quiz Shows were rigged. But they never blamed themselves for the part they palyed in it. If they didn't like certain contestants, if they didn't watch more of them, if they weren't invested emotionally and economically, the scandal probably wouldn't have happened. And rather than blame themselves they did what we always do: we blame the face of the scandal, not our part in it. No one was ever going to give bakc their televisions or admit they'd been fooled. So they'd blame the contestants.

So the idea that control of television was even a factor of the battle for American morals is, in my mind, an exaggeration. The only people responsible for morals are the people themselves. Lincoln said: "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." The thing is you can do that - the human mind has an infinite capacity for delusion. I speak from experience. We'd be better as a people if we could accept that about ourselves.

Sorry for the philosophical digression. But this is a theme of many of my blogs. This just saved me an article.