Extract

· 3 · money, fraud, and deception The Quiz Show Scandals The American people don’t believe anything until they see it on television. —Richard Nixon The introduction of TV changed the notion of mediated authenticity. Audio-visual communication was not a completely new phenomenon, as moving pictures had been introduced through the cinema, and the radio had been a forerunner for visual broadcast media. I will thus assume that the au- thenticity illusions in TV partly built on the pre-existing illusions in radio and film, but also established its own medium-specific authenticity illusions and a unique contract with the viewers. This chapter will use literature on audio-visual media and theories of broadcasting to investigate how television addressed its audiences and es- tablished an authenticity contract. As with radio, TV soon became a promi- nent social institution and key source of information and entertainment, and the viewers developed an intimate relation with the TV personality. In this chapter, I will explore the authenticity illusions in television and how reality was constructed in early audio-visual mass media. As in the previous chapter, I will explore an authenticity scandal to demonstrate the balance between authenticity illusions and deception. 46 mediated authenticity Structurally, this chapter is divided into two main parts. In the first part, I will discuss the introduction of TV and its audio-visual authenticity. Here I will also engage with the larger societal shift towards a visual culture. In the second part, I will analyse the so-called American quiz show scandals of the late 1950s,...