Marie Winn, a journalist, author and birdwatcher, is known for her books and articles on the birds of Central Park, for her Wall Street Journal ornithology column, for her critical coverage of television, and for her role in the incident that kicked off the quiz show scandals that rocked American entertainment in the late 1950s. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, one of two daughters of a psychiatrist (her sister is the writer Janet Malcolm) Winn is a U.S. citizen who attended the Bronx High School of Science, Radcliffe College and Columbia University. The author of the influential The Plug-In Drug (1977), an often scathing critique of television's addictive influence on the young, Winn wrote, "The television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a pleasurable and passive mental state." In 2002, she added new material to update the study as The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life, published on the 25th anniversary of the original book. Winn's influence as a media critic proved something of an irony considering how her name first became known to the general public: When she was a 21-year-old Columbia student, she became a contestant on Dotto, a newly popular daytime CBS television quiz show. When a fellow contestant found a notebook with answers belonging to Winn, at about the time a nighttime version of the show looked like an NBC hit, it triggered a series of internal investigations that led to Dotto being canceled on both networks. Ten days later, newspaper stories corroborating deposed Twenty-One champion Herb Stempel's charges of rigging launched the quiz show scandal in earnest. When excerpts from The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life were included in a communications textbook of the 1990s, a 1998 review board [1] took note of Winn's quiz show background, because Winn's book does not acknowledge her role in television game show scandals, even though it is an accepted media studies text praised by academics. An advocate for protecting wildlife, Winn gave the name Pale Male to the Red-tailed Hawk that nested on a Fifth Avenue building, receiving much press coverage. [2] She was prominent in preserving Pale Male's nest when it was threatened with removal. She wrote about these events in her book, Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male's Story - A True Wildlife Drama in Central Park (1998). The book is an expansion of her Smithsonian magazine articles and her column in The Wall Street Journal. Frederic Lilien's documentary film, Pale Male (2002), is an adaptation of Winn's book and includes interview scenes with Winn.
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References
- Winn, Marie. New York Times, "[What Became of Childhood Innocence?]" (January 25, 1981).
- Winn, Marie and Creshkoff, Rebekah. The Birds of Central Park: An Annotated Checklist (pdf)
Selected bibliography
- The Fireside Book of Children's Songs (Simon and Schuster, 1966)
- The Plug-In Drug (Penguin, 1977)
- Red-Tails in Love (Random House, 1998)
- Birds of Central Park by Cal Vornberger, foreword by Marie Winn (Abrams, 2005)
