Alan Rosenthal notes that "of the 115 movies shown on TV in the first broadcast sesaon of 1992, 43 were docudramas." Also that "in the overall 1991 TV season, seven out of the top ten highest-rated movies made for TV were based on real-life happenings." See Alan Rosenthal, Writing Docudrama. Boston: Focal Press, 1995.

A warrant locates the basis in common knowledge, common sense, and/or rules of logic that allow an argument to make the necessary shift from fact to value. "Warrants indicate how, given the available grounds, it [is] reasonable for the listener or reader to make the inferential leap from them to the claim [. . .] Warrants are found in things already accepted as true as a part of common knowledge, values, customs, and societal norms. Rybocki, Karen and Rybocki, D.J. Advocacy and Opposition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1991. p. 52.

See Kent Anderson, Televison Fraud (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978); Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Thomas A. Delong, Quiz Craze (New York: Praeger, 1991); Walter Karp, "The Quiz-Show Scandal," American Heritage, May-June 1989; and Michael Real, "The Great Quiz Show Scandal," Television Quarterly Winter 1994.

At least one prominent philosopher (Charles Frankel) and one political scientist (Hans Morganthau) went on record to this effect. Walter Karp, "The Quiz-Show Scandal," American Heritage, May-June 1989, p. 88.

Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1988.

The film's chronology compresses the actual time frame of two years between Van Doren's competition and the testimony he gives in Washington.

This departure is a development of the film more so than Goodwin's book. Goodwin refers early on to a boyhood encounter when, in defending his younger brother, he ended up retaliating against an anti-Semitic taunt made by one of their friends (p. 15); he also describes Stempel's features "as bearing a dark, Semitic stamp" (p. 69), but otherwise makes no other reference nor speculation of any kind as to the role of anti-Semitism in the scandals.