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Herbert Stempel's Whistle On The Popular Quiz Show Twenty-One

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Herbert Stempel will forever be known as the man who blew the whistle on the popular quiz show “Twenty-One”. Stempel, a once contestant on the show was coached by producer Dan Enright and was given the questions and answers in advance ultimately cheating his way through the quiz show. There are many theories as to why Stempel would admit his involvement in the quiz show scandal. Some believe he was fueled by greed, others believe he was jealous of his fellow contestant Charles Van Doren, and some believe he was seeking revenge against producer Dan Enright. I happen to believe that it was a mixture of all three that drove Stempel to the district attorney’s office.
It all started when Herbert Stempel, a man who grew up in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, submitted a letter to be on a popular television game show called “Twenty-One”. Stempel was a man who had what he referred to as a “retentive memory”. He was able to retain vast amounts of random knowledge which aided him in scoring the highest score ever on the three and a half hour long trivia test that was provided by the producers of the show “Twenty-One”. Stempel did not know at the time but he had scored two hundred and fifty one of the questions correct out of the three hundred and sixty three questions?. Due to Stempel’s astonishingly high score on the trivia test he was chosen to …show more content…

One of those contestants was James Snodgrass who testified that he was too given the questions and answers in advance and admitted that on the occasions when he were given the questions and answers, he would put them in a sealed envelope immediately after receiving them and would address them to himself at his home address in a registered mail envelope which was presented as key evidence and helped investigators take Stempel’s accusations that the show was in fact rigged seriously (Redford,

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