I had never heard of C harles Van Doren until, in college, I saw the movie “Quiz Show,” and I probably never thought of him again until I read his obituary this week in The Times. Van Doren, if you didn’t know, was the polished scion of a distinguished American literary family, who in the 1950s was a champion contestant on the NBC show “Twenty-One,” dazzling millions of viewers with what looked like preternatural erudition.

But the show had been rigged, the contestants coached, their fates determined by the need of the producers to manufacture drama and maintain ratings. When the truth came out, America was scandalized and Van Doren nearly ruined.

“I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years,” he told a congressional committee in 1959, after finally coming clean about what he had done (along with other contestants). He spent the remainder of his 93 years living a decidedly quiet and unblemished life.

How quaint.

Had Van Doren come along a few decades later, there would have been no big scandal in fabricating reality and no great shame in participating in it. The lines between fame and infamy would have blurred, and both could be monetized. Personal disgrace might have been explained away as a form of victimization by a greedy corporation, an unloving parent, systemic social forces — or with the claim, possibly true, that nearly everybody does it.