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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

you've got Accuracy in Media Today, which is an outgrowth of that particular period. I'm not sure I can give you the precise, or not precise but even the general date, but it was a post war problem. And it wasn't unique to broadcasting although we took more of a beating on it than the print media did. And print, of course, wasn't regulated in the sense that it had a license from the federal government. Broadcasting was more vulnerable to the kind of thing that was represented by the McCarthy forces and the people who came along later with Red Channels.

Advertisers didn't want to offend potential customers and there were some advertisers who didn't want to be involved with anything that was controversial. And so they backed off of news and public affairs programming and went to entertainment and things that were totally safe.

In the entertainment side, we had difficulty because there were members of the Actors Guild who had been charged with being sympathetic to the Communist point of view, and some advertisers didn't want to have anything to do with programs that hired those people. So this permeated not only the news side but it infected the entertainment side as well. Forget what was said on the entertainment program, there were advertisers who didn't want to feed them by giving them any income so that they could survive in the marketplace.

This ran roughshod across the entire schedule and was very difficult to deal with. It went so far as -- well, there were Congressional hearings on it. We felt it was necessary to ask employees that had anything to do with the actual broadcast schedule to sign loyalty oaths.

Q:

And this was around 1950? Or before.





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