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PORTSIDE CULTURE

RED CHANNELS: AMERICA’S LASTING LEGACY OF REPRESSION  
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Ed Rampell
June 21, 2025
The Progressive
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_ Writer Rampell looks at a long-forgotten, but deeply influential,
document from the domestic Cold War that served the unofficial
blacklist for radio and television performers, with the aim of helping
draw lessons for today. _

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_Red Channels
The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television_
American Business Consultants
Publishers of _Counterattack_
 

On June 22, 1950, a conservative anti-communist publication called
_Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and
Television_
[[link removed]]
became key to the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklisting campaign.
Seventy-five years later, as President Donald Trump and his followers
instigate similar attacks on artists, public cultural figures, and
institutions, _Red Channels_ represents more than just a past chapter
in American history. Rather than a chronicle of antiquity, _Red
Channels _and other texts of the 1940s and 1950s Red Scare provide
real insight into Trump’s current inquisitions.

This tattletale publication, co-authored by three ex-FBI agents, was
“the closest anyone came to an official blacklist” during the
anti-communist witch hunts aimed at stifling dissent during the Cold
War, writes _New York Times _reporter Clay Risen in _Red Scare:
Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America_
[[link removed]].
This persecution of everyday Americans
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spearheaded by the FBI, the House Committee on Un-American Activities
(known as
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HUAC), and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations. _Red Channels_ was published just days before the
beginning of the Korean War. These two committees “used that war as
a reason to ramp up surveillance of and retaliation against
progressives across the media,” says University of Oregon professor
Carol Stabile.

Whereas by 1947 HUAC was focused on motion pictures, _Red Channels
_zoomed in on broadcasting. The 109-page booklet listed in
alphabetical order what Stabile, author of the 2018 book _The
Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist_
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“a wide array” of 151 entertainers and journalists in radio and
the growing television industry who allegedly had Communist Party ties
and sympathies. The list of those accused included actress Jean Muir,
folk singer Pete Seeger, dancer Gypsy Rose Lee, poet Langston Hughes,
singer and actress Lena Horne, playwright Lillian Hellman, composer
and conductor Leonard Bernstein, news reporter Howard K. Smith, writer
Dorothy Parker, comedian Zero Mostel, and actor and director Orson
Welles, among others. In her book, Stabile quotes
[[link removed]] pianist Hazel Scott—one of the
forty-one women denounced by _Red Channels_, who was also married to
New York Democratic Congressmember Adam Clayton Powell—as calling
the McCarthyites “smear artists with spray guns.”

Stabile notes that _Red Channels_ was touted as the “bible of the
blacklist,” helping to spread the gospel of anti-communism. _Red
Channels_, which was published by _Counterattack, _a weekly
mimeographed newsletter for subscribers that continued to be published
until the late 1960s, was used by television and radio sponsors, as
well as rightwing organizations such as the American Legion, to affect
employment in broadcasting. For instance, in July 1950 _Red Channels
_organized a letter-writing campaign against Muir, who appeared in
_The Aldrich Family_. Muir was soon fired by NBC after sponsor General
Foods Corporation issued a statement stigmatizing her as “a
controversial personality whose presence . . . might adversely affect
sales of the advertiser’s product.”

In September 1950, _The New York Times _reported
[[link removed]]:
“The sponsors and advertisers have put the future of the medium in
the hands of a ‘kangaroo court’ largely of their own devising.
There now is under way in both radio and television a ‘Red purge’
which could lead anywhere. The minimum American standards of fair play
have been thrust aside in timid appeasement of a handful of pressure
groups . . . . was presumed guilty without being given an opportunity
to prove her innocence.”

Stabile recounts that in 1950, Gypsy Rose Lee became a target of
anticommunist agitators after being offered a role as the host of the
CBS quiz show _What Makes You Tick?_” The American Legion, a
prominent veterans’ group, accused her of having ties to the
Communist Party, citing _Red Channels_ as its source. Despite Lee
signing an affidavit denying any communist connections,  _What Makes
You Tick?_ was cancelled in October.

According to Stabile, _Red Channels _often falsely accused
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performers, such as the so-called
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Lady” Ireene Wicker and the actor and singer Paul Robeson, of
communist activities and memberships. Even if these artists had done
what the inquisitors alleged, Stabile says, they would still not have
been breaking any U.S. laws. “There were so many important reasons
for being members in that period,” Stabile writes. “The Communist
Party was alone in promoting so many progressive causes we’re still
fighting for today. Being a member of the Communist Party was not
illegal.” During the Depression the Communist Party of the United
States (CPUSA) was often at the forefront of the struggle for civil
rights, such as with their support of the “Scottsboro Boys
[[link removed]],” nine young
Black men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in
1931. Communist Party members also spearheaded unionization drives and
strikes, and vigorously opposed fascism.

France-based journalist and novelist Dennis Broe points out, “[FBI
Director John Edgar Hoover] assigned 400 agents to destroy communism,
but only ten to track organized crime.”

In a similar vein, Trump has gone after a variety of high-profile
law-abiding dissenters: Taylor Swift
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Bruce Springsteen
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Oprah Winfrey
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and Bob Woodward,
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as well as institutions including the Kennedy Center
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ABC
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CBS
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_The Des Moines Register_
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and public interest law firms
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As Stabile tells _The Progressive_, “attacks on high profile people
send warnings that if you dissent, if you’re someone as powerful as
Springsteen, you still can be harmed and attacked; then what chance do
other people have to stand up?”

As is the case today, those subjected to scrutiny and persecution
during the Red Scare were not being accused or charged, let alone
convicted, of committing crimes. NBC didn’t drop Muir from its
sitcom in 1950 because she robbed banks, but because, according to
Risen’s _Red Scare_, she’d supported progressive causes and served
as “vice president of the Congress of American Women, which the
Attorney General had listed as a subversive organization.” 

Professor Francis MacDonnell, author of the 2024 book _Policing Show
Business, J. Edgar Hoover, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Cold War
Movies_
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draws parallels between today’s use of “woke” as a derogatory
smear and yesterday’s similar use of “communism.” MacDonnell
continues, “To me, the whole concept of ‘woke’ is so vague and
more like an epithet you throw at some idea you don’t like but
don’t want to actually have to engage with an argument in any
detail. So, you just dismiss it by saying ‘woke.’ ” In any case,
being “woke” isn’t illegal.

If parallels between the Red Scare and Trumpism seem like déjà vu,
Stabile explains why: “The playbook is very familiar—it’s
unsurprising, as these are people who learned at the feet of Roy Cohn,
so they know lots about pressure, retaliation, and bullying.” Cohn,
McCarthy’s chief counsel, mentored Donald Trump prior to eventually
being disbarred
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defrauding a dying client—a scandal that is dramatized in the 2024
film _The Apprentice_ [[link removed]], which,
predictably, Trump tried to suppress
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Informing on others has always been a key component for inquisitors.
“The [FBI’s anti-communist] COMINFIL
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program was built on an army of confidential informants,” Stabile
says. “Today there are groups like Canary Mission
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producing their own lists
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of ‘subversives.’ ” She adds, “It was a confidential informant
whose testimony was used
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Abrego Garcia to El Salvador . . . . We absolutely are [seeing a
similar network to those in the 1950s.]”  

Broe, author of two recent novels set during the Hollywood blacklist,
_Left of Eden_
[[link removed]] and _The
Dark Ages_
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striking similarities between 1950s House hearings interrogating
filmmakers and the Congressional grilling of university presidents in
the wake of the 2023 protests over the war in Gaza. “When three
heads of Ivy League colleges were called before the modern HUAC, they
were asked: ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a supporter of
Hamas?’ ” Instead of communism, Broe asserts, “Palestine is the
issue that the modern McCarthyism is centered around, trying to make
any support illegal.”

In terms of resistance, what other lessons can be learned from the
American inquisition of 1947 to 1960? According to MacDonnell:
“During the Red Scare, one of the great defenses for possible
victims of the blacklist was the courts. Both actor Fredric March and
producer Dore Schary filed suits against people who smeared their
reputations.” 

Broe insists that individuals must stand up to censorship, repression,
persecution, and attacks on the First Amendment—such as when
producers Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger gave Hollywood Ten
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo a screen credit under his real name,
instead of a pseudonym, for the movies _Spartacus _and _Exodus_, a
stand which helped end
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the blacklist in 1960.

Instead of caving in to Trump’s threats and bluster, it’s time for
all of us to proclaim
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Spartacus!”

Ed Rampell is a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic who
contributes regularly to _The Progressive._ His novel about the
Native Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement for Indigenous rights, _The
Disinherited: Blood Blalahs_, will be published this spring.

* 1950s Red Scare
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* the Blacklist
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* Radio and Television
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* Donald Trump
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