第11章 被操控的电视竞猜节目
- McDonald was a genuine longtime believerin “thought transference." Thus when DukeUniversity's Dr. Joseph BanksRhine publishedhis research on telepathy, includingone research project that seemedto demonstrate certainindividuals were able to guess cards better than if they had by chance, McDonaldsought to sponsor network radio experiments in Rhine's technique, conducted by Northwestern University's psychologists Dr. Louis Deal Goodfellow and Dr. Robert Harvey Gault. Each Sunday, the series The Zenith Foundation would broadcast on NBC, duringwhich certain individuals would concentrate on cards. Radio listeners would then try to "pick up the senders'thought waves." Ultimately, Dr. Goodfellow concluded"no evidence of extrasensory perception in these experiments."For more information, see LarryWolters,"News of Radio,"ChicagoTribune, September 7, 1937; and "Patterns and Peephole," Time, September 5, 1938, 16.
2."McDonald v.the Adenoidal," Time, February 4, 1946, 66.
- In fact, McDonald disliked commercials even during the radio era. He believed that radio commercials had too many “roars, grunts, squawks, yaps, burps, and a mixture of adenoidal and . . . honey-chile voices." "McDonald v. the Adenoidal,"66. For this reason, starting in 1940 McDonaldand Zenith spent\$75,000 a year, approximately \$9oo,ooo in today's terms, tosupport WWZR, a radio station that only broadcast music, without any commercials.
4.Caetlin Benson-Allott, Remote Control (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2o15), 49. For an image of the cited advertisement in full, as wellas various imagesof the device in use, see “Remembering Eugene Polley and his Flash-MaticRemote (photos)," CNet .com,accessedFebruary 5,2016,http://www.cnet.com/pictures/remembering-eugene -polley-and-his-flash-matic-remote-photos/.
- Margalit Fox, "Eugene Polley, Conjuror of a Device That Changed TV Habits, Dies at 96,"NewYork Times, May 22, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/business /eugene-t-polley-inventor-of-the-wireless-tv-remote-dies-at-96.html.
- As quoted in the New York Herald Tribune, October 12, 1956, and reproduced in Robert Andrews,The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1993), 900.
- Jacques Ellul, Propaganda:The Formation of Men's Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Leaner (New York: Vintage, 1973), 103.
- Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York:D. McKay, 1957).
9.“The Hidden Persuaders,"The New Yorker, May 18, 1957, 167.
- Ellul, Propaganda.
I1. Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, 266.
- For more on Dotto, see David Baber, Television Game Show Hosts: Biographies of 32 Stars (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008).
- House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Investigation of Television QuizShows: Hearings Before aSubcommittee ofthe Committee of Interstate and Foreign Commerce, United States House of Representatives, 86th Congress (196o), 624.
14.Walter Lippmann, The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy, eds. Clinton Rossiter and James Lare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 411–12.
15.Larry Ingram, "Network TV Faces Day of Reckoning," SundayDenver Post, November 20, 1960, AA1.
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