pictures as "belts" to transmit pro-Sovietism to the American public. The introduction to Red Channels described how the Communist Party attracts both financial and political backing from those in the entertainment industry: No cause which seems calculated to arouse support among people in show business is ignored: the overthrow of Francoist Spain, the fight against anti-Semitism and Jimcrow, civil rights, world peace, the outlawing of the H-Bomb, are all used. Around such pretended objectives, the hard core of Party organizers gather a swarm of "reliables" and well-intentioned "liberals," to exploit their names and their energies. Red Channels served as a vehicle for the expansion of the entertainment industry blacklist that denied employment to a host of artists it considered sympathetic to "subversive" causes, attempted to forestall criticism by claiming that the Communist Party itself engaged in blacklisting, seeing to it that "articulate anti-Communists are blacklisted and smeared with that venomous intensity which is characteristic of Red Fascists alone." Red Channels list Red Channels listed 151 professionals in entertainment and on-air journalism whom it clearly implied were among "the Red Fascists and their sympathizers" in the broadcasting field. Each of the names is followed by a raw list of putatively telling data, with the sources of evidence varying from FBI and HUAC citations to newspaper articles culled from the mainstream press, industry trade sheets, and such Communist publications as the Daily Worker. For example, under the heading for Burgess Meredith, identified as Actor, Director, ProducerStage, Screen, Radio, TV, the first three of a total of seven data points read: Impact Jean Muir was the first performer to lose employment because of a listing in Red Channels. In 1950 Muir was named as a Communist sympathizer in the pamphlet, and was immediately removed from the cast of the television sitcom The Aldrich Family, in which she had been cast as Mrs. Aldrich. NBC had received between 20 and 30 phone calls protesting her being in the show. General Foods, the sponsor, said that it would not sponsor programs in which "controversial persons" were featured. Though the company later received thousands of calls protesting the decision, it was not reversed. Many other well-known artists were named, including Hollywood stars such as Edward G. Robinson and Orson Welles (who by then, due to tax problems, was in Europe), literary figures such as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman, and musicians such as Hazel Scott, Pete