Free Republic

Charles Van Doren, a Columbia University English instructor and a member of a distinguished literary family who confessed to Congress and a disillusioned nation in 1959 that his performances on a television quiz show had been rigged, died on Tuesday in Canaan, Conn. He was 93. He died at Geer Village, a retirement community, near his home in Cornwall, Conn., where he had lived for several years, his son, John, said. In the heyday of quiz shows in the 1950s, when scholarly housewives and walking encyclopedia nerds battled on “The $64,000 Question” and “Tic-Tac-Dough,” Mr. Van Doren was a rare...

...confirmed for us here on GretaWire: the McCain campaign did NOT know about Gwen Ifill’s book (I think I told them when I made my efforts - emails about midnight - to find out!) I am stunned….the campaign (actually both) should have been told before the campaign agreed to have her moderate. It simply is not fair - in law, this would create a mistrial.

THE brainy English teacher who became the central figure in the quiz-show scandals of the late 1950s has broken his silence. Charles Van Doren, 82, is finally telling his side of the story in a first-person account published in this week's New Yorker magazine, which came out yesterday. Van Doren - who lives in Connecticut with his wife of 50 years and still teaches college-level English (most recently at the University of Connecticut in Torrington) - said he decided to go public with his version of the "Twenty-One" quiz-show story for the sake of his grandchildren. The New Yorker story...

I've been thinking about the implications of if the CBS memos end up being proven fake. I think very soon, that they will be. There is too much evidence against them, and almost nothing that would support them being real, except for Dan Rather and CBS backing them(which isn't exactly evidence). Bloggers are comparing this to Watergate, which this case will resemble even more if anyone in the Kerry campaign is found involved with the forgeries. I think, however, that this scandal will resemble the quiz show scandals of the 50's more than Watergate, because a news organization is involved....