Marie Winn

Marie Winn (née Wienerová; 1936) is a journalist, author, and bird-watcher. She is known for her books and articles on the wildlife of Central Park and her Wall Street Journal Leisure & Arts column. She appears in Frederic Lilien's documentary film, The Legend of Pale Male (2010). She is also known for writing The Plug-In Drug (1977), which explored the impact of television on young children, and for her involvement in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Early life Born into a Jewish family in 1936 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Winn is one of two daughters of Hanna (née Taussig) and Josef Wiener aka Joseph A. Winn, a psychiatrist; her sister was the writer Janet Malcolm. Winn is a U.S. citizen who attended the Bronx High School of Science, Radcliffe College and Columbia University. In May 1958, while Winn was a contestant on Dotto, a knowledge-quiz type TV game, a notebook which belonged to her was found by another contestant, Ed Hilgemeier, who discovered that the notebook included questions and answers to be used during Winn's appearances. Jack Narz, the host of Dotto at the time, recalled, when interviewed for a PBS documentary, that he believed Winn to be "a little too pat" when giving her answers. A CBS executive vice president, Thomas Fisher, tested kinescopes of the show against Winn's notebook and concluded that the show appeared to have been fixed. The executives also learned the show's producers had paid Winn, Hilgemeier, and Winn's opponent Yaffe Kimball-Slatin to keep quiet about the notebook. Writing career