ABSTRACT
For broadcasting, the new decade began with scandals-first came the quiz show scandal in 1958 (who knew these shows were rigged? Even Time magazine had been fooled), and then in 1959 came the payola scandal-accusations that the Top 40 charts were rigged and that disc jockeys took money from record companies to play certain songs. Soon, the quiz shows were gone from TV, and one winning contestant who had been perceived as a hero, Professor Charles Van Doren, was shown to have been part of the fraud. Rock and roll was getting assaulted by members of Congress, out-of-work musicians (playing Top 40 records had meant the official end of live orchestras on most stations), and assorted media critics who preferred the music of the big band era. Parents became concerned-was the music their kids liked really as dangerous as some legislators claimed? There had been controversy about suggestive lyrics in rock since the mid-1950s; Variety published an editorial insisting that the double entendres had to stop (most kids, myself among them, could not understand many rock lyrics, so we had no clue what the critics were complaining about), and, just as in the 1920s, parent-teacher groups and politicians accused the new music of causing everything from pregnancy to delinquency.
