Politics
There was a side of Collyer's career that involved controversy. During his 1950s heyday with Beat The Clock and To Tell The Truth, he was a leader in an overtly anti-Communist faction of the New York chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. That faction supported such publications as Red Channels (the famous list of 151 reputed Communists or reputed fellow travelers, as the term was then, in radio and television) and interest groups that shared the authors' politics—groups like AWARE, Inc. (co-founded, in fact, by the man who wrote Red Channels' introduction), purporting to screen broadcast performers for actual or alleged Communist ties, pressuring networks and advertisers to shun them under threat of boycott.
An opposing faction, led by CBS radio personality John Henry Faulk and Orson Bean, defeated Collyer's faction in an election to run the New York local.
Read more about this topic: Bud Collyer
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“His talk was like a spring, which runs
With rapid change from rocks to roses:
It slipped from politics to puns,
It passed from Mahomet to Moses;
Beginning with the laws which keep
The planets in their radiant courses,
And ending with some precept deep
For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.”
—Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–1839)
“A baby changes your dinner party conversation from politics to poops.”
—Maurice Johnstone (20th century)
“Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.”
—Peggy Noonan (b. 1950)