#red channels

[oldshowbiz]

Garry Moore tried to challenge the Blacklist

[commiepinkofag]

Red Channels Russians looking at television sets and radios at the USSR Exhibition in Sokolniki Park, Moscow, next to the American National Exhibition.  5 August 1959. US News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection.

[commiepinkofag]

Red Channels

The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television CounterAttack, June 1950

[gregorygalloway]

Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television was published on 22 June 1950. Released 3 years after the start of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the “report” provided the names of 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists, and others who were suspected of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. While some of them had already been blacklisted, Red Channels effectively placed all 151 on the blacklist.

Red Channels (published by the right-wing journal Counterattack) listed many notable stars, including Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, John Garfield, Ruth Gordon, Dashiell Hammett, E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Burl Ives, Alan Lomax, Burgess Meredith, Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel, Dorothy Parker, Edward G. Robinson, Pete Seeger, Artie Shaw, and Orson Welles.  All had to publicly try to clear their names, many before Congress (Welles left for Europe, where he would remain until 1956).

[your-instructions-from-moscow]

On June 22, 1950, the editors of Counterattack, a four-page “newsletter of facts on communism,” issued a slim volume with weighty impact: Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, a listing of entertainers deemed to be Communist Party members or to have like-minded opinions and associations (“fellow travelers” in the argot of the day). … After the warm-up, Red Channels went about the business of enumeration, “an alphabetical index of names,” 151 in number, from Larry Adler (“harmonica player”) to Lesley Woods (“actress— radio”). The artists listed ranged from lockstep Communist Party hacks, to mainstream liberals, to bewildered innocents; the offenses encompassed everything from blunt avowals of party-line doctrine to innocuous expressions of progressive sentiment. It was one playbill on which actors did not want to see their names printed and their credits listed.

– Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture

[lameekly]

Anti-communism in Hollywood! Counterattack/Red Channels and HUAC put out reports and sensational periodicals naming names. We're so glad artifacts like this are preserved to show how shitty we are to each other

[noiseymusic]

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GOVERNMENT SUPPRESSING MUSIC

First Amendment rights apply to music too.