The time is December 1956; producers of the NBC-owned quiz show "21" have promised the Stempel character a permanent spot on a new panel show they are planning, or so he thinks. Television, he declares, "is the biggest thing since Gutenberg invented print"--and he sees his fortune ensured if he can only be a part of its explosive growth. It is fantasy, of course; he is so unattractive a personality that we understand there is no place for him on camera (on the other hand, his designated successor, the patrician Charles Van Doren, wows an adoring public). Deluded, the Stempel character goes along with the plan, muffs a question he knows the answer to, and when he does not get his chance for NBC stardom, runs to the newspapers with his charges of fraud and, later, to the Manhattan District Attorney. Eventually, "21," "The $64,000 Challenge," "Dotto," and the other tarted-up money shows were driven off the air, along with Van Doren.

The critic's reviews of Quiz Show were almost all enthusiastic, praising the director, Robert Redford, and the ensemble acting, especially John Turturro as the nerdy Stempel. But 35 years after the quiz-show scandals, the more intriguing reception has come not from the cineastes but from op-ed page columnists, editorialists, academics, and politicians. Beyond its literate script and evocation of a more "innocent" time, Quiz Show wants 1990s audiences to confront some uncomfortable matters involving contemporary television, that infant grown into the biggest force in Mediaworld. As the New Yorker asked in a recent article, "Is Television Still Cheating?"

The examples of how television still "cheats" on its audiences cited by the magazine, and by other commentators, are depressingly familiar: guests "screened"--that is, rehearsed--to punch up storylines before appearances on "Oprah," "Donahue," et al.; prime-time docudramas with invented conversations and composite characters; tabloid TV shows featuring re-enactments of crime cases still pending (with actors standing in for Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson, among others). Even the quality news programs of the old-line networks may bend standards to enhance "entertainment values." Prospective guests on "Nightline" and the "Today Show" learn how to sharpen their lines in the pre-interviews. When NBC's "Dateline" staged a fiery car crash to make a journalistic point about auto safety, it was the reputation of the news division that seemed to go up in smoke.

Yet most of the Quiz Show commentary left unexamined what may be contemporary television's most serious cheating of all: the effective theft of childhood from America's children. The quiz shows tricked consenting adults; today's TV seduces kids, who spend more time in front of the box than they do in school. If the statistics are to be believed, the average American child witnesses some 200,000 TV murders by the time he or she turns 18. Last month in Washington, a city with a notoriously short attention span, some people began talking seriously about the long-term social effects of our children's "loss of innocence."

The starting point was the film itself. Northwestern University's Annenberg Washington Program and Medill School of Journalism brought together director Robert Redford, current and former television executives, and public officials. They watched Quiz Show and then participated in a panel discussion with the ambitious title "Quiz Show and the Future of Television." The panelists saw the future, and it does not work.

Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA), Chairman of the House Telecommunications and Finance Subcommittee, described the realities of the television marketplace today: the proliferation of cable channels creates the need for a more competitive product and increases pressures for ratings, whatever the cost. At the same time, the weakening of the Federal Communications Commission's power over broadcasting--achieved in the name of deregulation--means that producers really do not have to answer for their actions, whether for small ethical compromises or gross dramatic assaults on the senses. "Honesty and integrity" suffer, Markey said. "The bottom line becomes the only standard."

Any feeling that these were "only" public-policy abstractions quickly ended when the other panelists spoke. One was Newton Minow, Director of The Annenberg Washington Program. In the period following the quiz-show scandals John F. Kennedy appointed Minow head of the FCC--the "toughest chairman ever," Godfrey Hodgson declared in his popular history, America In Our Time. Minow denounced TV as a "vast wasteland" in a 1961 speech and "threatened to hold hearings to discuss direct regulation," Hodgson wrote. "Network officials felt the pressure to make at least some flowers bloom in the wasteland."

Revisiting television today, Minow found the flowers wilted, the idea of the broadcasters' public trust rejected, and television's future--its young audience--neglected, abandoned for bigger body counts and entertainment values. Too many parents, Minow said, have failed their kids, who often spend more time in front of the TV set than with their mothers or fathers.

Robert Redford, who also appeared on the panel, contrasted the Quiz Show era of 1950s television with TV today. Then, he said, children regarded TV as a "miracle." Now, it's "life"--part of the symbolic air that all of us, children and adults, reflexively breathe. But, Redford added, others would have to take TV on: "it's not up to me to moralize."

Where director Redford declined to go, panelist Richard Goodwin plunged ahead. Goodwin's book, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties, was one of the principal sources for the Quiz Show script; his character, played by the actor Rob Morrow, provides the film's dramatic plot line and its moral center. In the film, as (loosely) in real life, House committee investigator Goodwin pursues the quiz-show scandals, pushing to put television itself "on trial." The passage of 35 years has not softened Goodwin's opinions of TV. He agreed with Redford that as far as the audience is concerned, "television values" are powerful and pervasive. And he added a third characteristic: TV, he said, is, ultimately, a "disintegrative" force, one that is corrosive to community. Congressman Markey had approached the idea of regulation cautiously; Goodwin was less politic. If government agencies, like the Food and Drug Administration, can regulate "things that pollute our body," he argued, then why not regulate "things that pollute our minds?"

Panelist Julian Goodman, the former President of NBC, and Don Hewitt, the longtime Executive Producer of CBS News' "60 Minutes," have both spent most of their adult careers working inside network television; unsurprisingly, they preferred to look for solutions to "TV pollution" elsewhere than government. While Goodman did not like the poisonous fare of such contemporary TV as the tabloid news shows, he placed his faith in the viewers' good sense; the audience, Goodman suggested, was capable of absorbing such stuff and moving on. Hewitt also made something of a leap of faith, backward to a time even earlier than Quiz Show. If only TV managements today were animated by the public-spirited leadership of broadcasting's founding fathers--ABC's Leonard Goldenson, CBS's William Paley, NBC's David Sarnoff--then bad TV would be driven off the air.

Outside pressure, or inside reform? A resilient public, or victimized viewers?

It remained for another panelist, Geraldine Laybourne, President of Nickelodeon, the children's cable network, to point a way out. Laybourne is an opponent of activist government; like 99.9 percent of broadcast executives, she does not want re-regulation of her business. But she also acknowledged that programmers in fact do have a public trust to carry out, and that they have to start talking about "the young and impressionable minds in our audience."

Laybourne proposed that network leaders and advertising executives meet at a "CEO Summit" to address their responsibilities to children. While Representative Markey had no trouble with the idea of private-sector initiatives, he also suggested that the Congress had to play its part as well. Given the current anti-Washington fervor, and the widespread feeling that "government" cannot do anything right, that may not be likely. But the hard truth is that parents, industry panels, and publicity have not yet been able to stop television's "cheating" on childhood.

The times may not be right for legislative attention to TV programming: "Hard Copy" and "Geraldo" routinely win higher public approval ratings than the Congress. No matter. The white hats have to regroup and organize a posse. There has to be a place in "the future of television" for the cause of the "public interest." Television needs once again some far-ranging, investigative hearings, much like those that gave national exposure to the quiz-show frauds of the 1950s, and sooner rather than later.

Someone might make a good film about it.