Can The Field of Communication Handle Another Red Scare?

In the new issue of Journalism History, Professor Victor Pickard writes about how redbaiting, “the process of discrediting — and ultimately silencing — particular groups and individuals by associating them with left-wing ideologies,” influenced the early communication field.

His essay, “Ideological Steering of US Media Research: The Role of Redbaiting in the Early Communication Field,” examines how redbaiting influenced the direction of the nascent field of communication in the 1930s and ‘40s. Ideological currents not only influenced what type of scholarship was funded, encouraged, and celebrated, but also who was allowed to conduct it, he writes.

In the essay, he traces how both implicit and explicit redbaiting shaped the early field, steering it away from critiques of commercial media industries and media reform activism and alienating and stigmatizing scholars who carried out these critiques. He also calls on us to reckon with this history to avoid further acts of intellectual repression.

We asked Professor Pickard to discuss the essay and its implications for current communication research and scholars.

Your essay presents several examples of communication scholars who were redbaited. Is there a case that stands out to you?

There are several that stand out, but Dallas Smythe is especially noteworthy. Smythe is widely considered to be one of the founders of the North American political economic tradition of communication research. Before taking an academic job in the late 1940s, he served as the first Chief Economist at the Federal Communications Commission and was responsible for much of their research into media ownership concentration. He was redbaited before he even stepped foot on campus to begin his first job at my alma mater, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Smythe had good reason to believe that one of his colleagues was surveilling him for the FBI. Unlike some other casualties of red-baiting, he still managed to maintain a successful academic career. However,  he eventually left the U.S. due to what he saw as increasing political repression and his sub-field of critical political economy has often been marginalized within the field of communication at least in part for ideological reasons.

You discuss how scholars were driven from academia for their political activism in the 1930s and 40s. The research center you co-direct — the Media, Inequality, and Change Center — embraces the intersection of scholarship and activism. How has the field of communication evolved and how can we keep it from backsliding?

The field has grown tremendously in studying how different activist groups deploy media and new digital technologies in advancing social justice and other political objectives. We now treat various forms of activism as worthy of academic study. Generally speaking, as a field, we’re now also much more welcoming of various kinds of public scholarship and civic engagement. And it’s true that much of this progress is threatened by the current intellectual repression we’re facing today. But more broadly, the field has never evolved to sufficiently confront and reckon with the capitalist excesses of the hyper-commercial U.S. media system. This ongoing deficit, I argue, is a legacy of ideological boundaries established during the field’s earliest days.

You also write about media policy scholar Charles Siepmann, who was redbaited and accused of trying to “BBC-ize” American radio in the 1940s. Currently, many academics, including yourself, argue that public media like the BBC is necessary for a healthy democracy. Did redbaiting play a role in the American public media’s development?

I do think redbaiting was a contributing factor in sending U.S. media down a different trajectory compared to most democracies. Many leading media reformers – especially Charles Siepmann, a largely forgotten figure in the field – were ruthlessly redbaited during the formative years in the 1930s and 40s when the U.S. media system was being established. I write about this key period in my first book. At the same time, many core assumptions — that our media should be largely dictated by the commercial market and controlled by a few corporations, that government had little role to play in funding or regulating media, and that media researchers should just accept these relationships as the natural order of things – all stem from this early imprint on the field of communication, one that was shaped in part by various kinds of redbaiting.

How can academics, students, colleagues, and friends protect each other from another Red Scare?

First and foremost, we need to practice solidarity and recognize that an injury to one is an injury to all. But a more long-term project must be to cultivate a deeper critical perspective on how concentrated media power — especially that caused by what I refer to in the book I’m writing now as “capitalist capture” — undercuts our media system’s democratic potential at a structural level. Our field needs to do a better job of denaturalizing such relationships — and not treating such critical inquiry as “off limits” — so that we can begin to imagine systemic alternatives that better serve democratic society.