Ideological Steering of US Media Research: The Role of Redbaiting in the Early Communication Field

The early US communication field took root during the 1930s and ‘40s upon a rapidly shifting ideological terrain. These years saw several critical threads of communication research rise and fall, while other less critical approaches ascended to become the dominant paradigm of communication research, emphasizing social science methods that consistently found only limited media effects. Although typically narrated as an intellectual/methodological interplay between critical and administrative approaches, early tensions in the field were also ideological, swaying research down a particular trajectory. To understand how certain types of research fell from favor, while others were more readily embraced, it’s instructive to consider an especially effective set of tools used to discipline the discipline that loosely fell under a general strategy: redbaiting.