Red Channels

Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television was an anti-Communist tract published in the United States at the start of the Red Scare. Issued by the right-wing journal Counterattack on June 22, 1950, the pamphlet-style book names 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists, and others in the context of purported Communist manipulation of the entertainment industry. Some of the 151 were already being denied employment because of their political beliefs, history, or association with suspected subversives. Red Channels effectively placed the rest on the industry blacklist.

In May 1947, Alfred Kohlberg, an American textile importer and an ardent member of the anti-Communist China Lobby, funded an organization, led by three former FBI agents, called American Business Consultants Inc., which issued a newsletter, Counterattack. Kohlberg was also an original national council member of the John Birch Society. Red Channels declared purpose was to "expos[e] the most important aspects of Communist activity in America each week". A special report, Red Channels: the Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, was published by Counterattack in June 1950.

The three founder members were: John G. Keenan, company president and the businessman of the trio; Kenneth M. Bierly, who would later become a consultant to Columbia Pictures; and Theodore C. Kirkpatrick, the managing editor of Counterattack and the group's spokesman. A former Army intelligence major, Francis J. McNamara, was the editor of Counterattack. The introduction to Red Channels, running just over six pages, was written by Vincent Hartnett, an employee of the Phillips H. Lord agency, an independent radio-program production house, or "packager". Hartnett would later found the anti-Communist organization AWARE, Inc. The 213-page tract, released three years after the House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating purported Communist Party influence in the entertainment field, claims to expose the spread – by means of advocacy of civil rights, academic freedom, and nuclear weapons control – of that influence, in radio and television entertainment. Referring to current television programming, the Red Channels introduction declares that

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