The hunt for red writers: The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee investigation of communists in the press, 1955--1956.

摘要

In June 1955, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee launched one the most serious challenges to the First Amendment freedom of the press in the history of the Constitution. Dozens of journalists were subpoenaed before a committee of Congress and compelled to testify in closed hearings and then in public sessions under a threat of contempt.;When the investigation concluded in January 1956, six reporters had been fired from their newspapers, including three from the New York Times. Three additional copy editors from the Times invoked a First Amendment refusal to answer questions were convicted of contempt of Congress and fought their convictions through the courts for years to keep their jobs. Since most of the journalists were from the Times, officials at that newspaper concluded that the investigation had been conducted in retribution for the Times' liberal editorial policies toward integration of Southern schools.;The investigation raised difficult issues that went beyond the Times. It represented a clash between freedom of the press, patriotism, and the civil liberties of journalists who had once belonged to the Communist Party but had dropped out many years earlier. Neither the American Newspaper Publishers Association nor the American Society of Newspaper Editors rallied to defend the Times or the journalists called to testify. Members of the Newspaper Guild refused to help reporters who were fired after invoking the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination when they were asked to name former colleagues in the Communist Party.;This dissertation describes the investigation, the controversy surrounding it, and its effect on the Times, journalists in the 1950s, and the newspaper industry. It found that the newspaper industry failed to recognize the threat posed by the Eastland investigation because it did not conform to traditional attacks on the press involving prior restraint or libel. It also found that the newspaper industry's ambivalence toward the investigation stemmed from a long-standing animosity held by newspaper publishers toward efforts of the Newspaper Guild to unionize journalists. As a result of these factors, the press failed to recognize the investigation as an indirect attack on the First Amendment and freedom of the press, resulting in one of the first instances in which newsrooms were drawn into the Cold War.