Letter to the Editor Letter to the Editor October 12, 1959 Is it more appalling to lie to a national audience or to coach someone on how best to lie to such an audience? This is a question that we, the contestants involved in the scandal, have asked ourselves over the past several months and which we pose to you and your readers now. Your newspapers have provided readers with tales of our greed, our unearned fame, and our tragic downfalls; your readers have written in to this paper and others, and have filled our own mailboxes with letters of disdain, of regret, and of accusations. And so we ask you now: is it the fault of the child when the parent urged the act? Why ought we be held responsible, be held in public contempt, for doing our jobs, for bringing to the American public countless nights of suspense, of laughs, and of entertainment? In the past week, we have testified in front of congressional committees, radio microphones, and television cameras, just as we had performed—filled with integrity, purpose, and a continuing hope to better our lives. Just last week, one of us, a teenager, was made to cry under the pressures of an unfeeling representative. This poor soul had been coached to fabricate her testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives, yet no congressman, no reporter, no gallery spectator sought to provide her comfort. The scene was a most poignant demonstration of our conflation of the immoral with the amoral. Ought not the producer, who pressured this girl of fifteen into lying, face the same searing heat from your media spotlight? Will his indiscretion not also sell papers to the masses heading home to watch this week’s champion answer the $64,000 question? To many people, the reports of this girl crying in Washington may be news, to many they may be entertainment, but to her? To her, they are unfiltered glimpses into real life. It was not this teenage girl, nor the eight-week champion grandmother from Pennsylvania, who stole the answers from a secure vault at Chase Manhattan. We have he