Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Panic!: CBS and the 1950s Blacklist
- Thursday, January 16, 2025 / 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM (PST)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 2K digital projection (30 minutes)
- With Carol Stabile (author of The Broadcast 41)
In 1949, radio and television network CBS was riding a wave of critical acclaim. Its news division and documentary unit boasted brilliant analysts and renowned filmmakers, while its slate of family programming held widely successful shows, many of which featured immigrant families as they assimilated into American life. But outside CBS, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover saw a problem: he accused the network of “selling socialism” and subverting American values by broadcasting programs sympathetic to communism to the nation. The FBI pressured CBS into cooperating with its widespread anti-communist campaign through a coordinated strategy of threats and retaliation. In response, CBS fired union members, filmmakers, and actors rumored to have communist connections—and it became the only network to institute a loyalty oath program requiring all employees to attest to their political affiliations.
In this special event, we will present two pieces of CBS broadcasting from the period: first, a 1951 episode of the TV sitcom The Goldbergs entitled “Mother-in-Law,” featuring a young Anne Bancroft. Gertrude Berg, the show’s creator, writer, and star, was pressured by CBS into firing her co-star, Philip Loeb, after he was blacklisted. To follow, we will hear a 1943 CBS radio broadcast, “Open Letter on Race Hatred.” William N. Robson won a Peabody award for the special broadcast, which he wrote in response to the 1943 riots in Detroit.
Following the event, Carol Stabile (University of Oregon, author of The Broadcast 41) will join Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center) for a discussion of blacklisting and television.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Carol Stabile (Clark Honors College, University of Oregon)
Carol Stabile researches and teaches about the history of gender, race, and class in media institutions. She is the award-winning author of five books, including Feminism and the Technological Fix, White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture, and The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist. Her articles have appeared in Camera Obscura, Cultural Studies, and South Atlantic Quarterly. She is currently working on a book project about the FBI’s Cold War crusade against radio and television network CBS. She is Dean of the Robert D. Clark Honors College. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Moderator Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center)
Patrice Petro is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Presidential Chair in Media Studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of fourteen books, including Uncanny Histories in Film and Media Studies (2022), The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, and E. Ann Kaplan, 2017), Teaching Film (2012), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (2010), Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (2006), and Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (2002). She served two terms as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest US professional organization for college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Presents: Panic!
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2024-25 feature series Panic! explores the complex relationship between media, an anxious public, and the turbulent currents of social, cultural, and moral panic. The series will examine how such panics have appeared on screen over the decades, but also consider how the screen itself—as technology, as gathering space, and as a site of fantasy and desire—becomes the object of reactionary backlash. Panic! will be a yearlong showcase of the films, discourses, and cultural practices that have tested the limits of public acceptability, and that have much to teach us about the cycles of panic that define our own political moment.
CWC TV
In recognition of the extraordinary accomplishments of the Center’s namesakes, Dick Wolf and Marcy Carsey, the Carsey-Wolf Center is committed to examining television as an institution, industry, and cultural form. In our post-network, multi-channel, multi-media environment, understanding television demands understanding its past as well as its future, through exploration of individual episodes, mini-series, and documentaries.