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News on the Right
News on the Right
Studying Conservative News Cultures
E D I T E D B Y A N T H O N Y N A D L E R A N D A . J. B A U E R
1
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CONTENTS
List of Figures and Tables  vii

Acknowledgments  ix
1. Taking Conservative News Seriously  1

A . J. B au e r a n d A n t h o n y N a d l e r
2. “From a Christian Perspective”: News/Talk in Evangelical Mass

Media  17
M a r k Wa r d S r .
3. Containing “Country Music Marxism”: How Fox News

Conservatized John Rich’s “Shuttin’ Detroit Down”  47
Reece Peck
4. Weaponizing Victimhood: Discourses of Oppression and the

Maintenance of Supremacy on the Right  64
Lee Bebout
5. NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics  84

D aw n R . G i l p i n
6. Making Media Safe for Corporate Power: Market Libertarian

Discourse in the 1940s and Beyond  106
Victor Pickard
7. Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure  123

Alex DiBranco
8. The British Right-Wing Mainstream and the European

Referendum  141
Angela Phillips
v
vi Contents
9. Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media: Propagandists for a

Liberal Machine and the American Establishment  157
Julie B. Lane
10. National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights

Memory: 1968–2016   174
Robert Greene II
11. Slanting the News: Media Bias and Its Effects  190

Anthony DiMaggio
12. Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream: Methodological

Considerations for Conservative News as a Subfield  213
Mark Major
13. Conservative News Studies: Mapping an Unrealized Field  232

A n t h o n y N a d l e r a n d A . J. B au e r
Contributors  251
Index 255
F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E S
Figures
11.1 Media Consumption by Ideology 197
11.2 Echo Chambers? Predictors of Cable News Consumption 197
11.3 Predictors of Attitudes Toward Various News Outlets 198
11.4 Perceptions of Media Bias in Presidential Elections (December
2007) 199
11.5 The Right-Wing Echo Chamber: Media Consumption and Political
Attitudes 200
11.6 Predictors of Conservative Political Opinions 202
11.7 Predictors of Obama Job Approval 203
11.8 Echo Chambers? The 2016 Presidential Election 205
11.9 Media Consumption and 2016 Voter Preferences 205
12.1 Human Events’ Use of the Term “Liberal Media/Press,”
1950–1989 220
12.2 New York Times’ Use of the Term “Liberal Media,” 1930s–1990s 226
Tables
2.1 Promotional Statements for Christian Radio News Services 25
2.2 Opening Bumpers of American Family Radio Talk Shows 26
2.3 Stories Reported on Selected Newscasts for January 8, 2018 30
2.4 Excerpts from American Family News Stories for January 8, 2018 33
2.5 Talk Shows Aired January 8, 2018, on Evangelical Radio 35
2.6 Talk Shows Aired January 8, 2018, on Salem Conservative News/Talk
Radio 39
vii
viii Figur e s and Table s
5.1 Sources of NRA Front-Page Headlines, mid-June 2017 to February

28, 2018 91
5.2 Dimensions of Second Amendment Discourse 101
11.1 Power of Partisan Media Consumption in Predicting Public
Opinion 201
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project began with a chance conversation at the Joint Journalism

Communication History Conference, held at New York University in March
2016. Tony was beginning a new project on right-wing populism; A.J. was finish-
ing a dissertation on the history of conservative media criticism. Both lamented
the relative lack of concerted scholarly focus on the study of right-wing media,
and began collaborating to build community. Our efforts gained a new sense of
urgency following the surprising election of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presi-
dency, and this book is one result.
Special thanks are due to the Department of Media and Communication
Studies at Ursinus College, which employed both of us during the 2017–2018
school year when we drafted and edited much of this volume. We were both
supported and sustained by the collegiality of Lynne Edwards, Jennifer Fleeger,
Sheryl Goodman, Alice Leppert, Louise Woodstock, Colleen Grzywacz, and by
countless students, staff, and other faculty colleagues. We are also thankful for
several interlocutors who encouraged us and shaped our thinking while produc-
ing this volume: Sierra Bell, Shelley Cobb, Brian Creech, Robert Dawley, Brian
Dolber, Joan Donovan, Christina Ceisel, Matt Crain, Letrell Crittenden, Julin
Everett, Neil Ewen, Des Freedman, Hannah Hamad, Leslie Lars Hunter, Annie
Karreth, Johannes Karreth, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Magda Koniecza, William
Lawson, Jonathan Marks, David Mindich, Susan McGregor, Lee McGuigan,
Brice Nixon, Andy Opel, Devon Powers, Jen Schneider, Doron Taussig, Susanna
Throop, Joe Tompkins, Andrea Wenzel, Julie Wilson, and Asta Zelenkauskaite.
Tony dedicates his work on this volume to his late father, Richard Nadler.
Tony’s thinking about the many topics swirling around this project have been
profoundly influenced by myriad conversations beyond what surfaces in cita-
tions. Mary Vavrus and Kathy Roberts Forde have been outstanding mentors
who have offered intellectual guidance and inspiration for well over a decade
now. Tony would like thank family and friends outside academia who have
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
shared such wide-ranging perspectives on and enthusiasm for talking about

partisan news who include Andy Anderson, Rebecca Blakely, Scott Blakely,
Marty Foix, Brandon Irvine, Marc Levine, Bill Lindeke, Sarah H. Luizzi, Eliah
Lux, Jesse McClelland, Matt Meyer, Tami Morse, Kathy Nadler, Margie Nadler,
Nick Perlman, Pat Shink, Scott Schway, Andy Wilson, and Dina Zhang. While
this book doesn’t address specific findings from his interviews, Tony would also
like to thank the many conservative news consumers and conservative media
workers who have generously volunteered to share their thoughts and stories
with him through interviews. These perspectives have offered deep insight even
beyond specific research findings. Tony would like to give a special recogni-
tion of gratitude to Alice Leppert who read so many drafts, indulged in so many
dinner conversations, and provided rich feedback and spirited encouragement
throughout this project. Tabitha Lepler offered a burst of joy at the end of the
project; she even allowed Tony to get decent sleep on most days!
A.J. dedicates his work on this volume to his late mother, Mary Ann Baker.
She first introduced him to conservative news, as an avid Dittohead in the
early 1990s, and this book’s production coincided with her declining health.
She was adamant, in her final weeks, that he spent less time with her and more
time on meeting book production deadlines. He refused, but knows she would
find solace that this book was nevertheless completed. He would like to thank
his family—especially Bruce Baker, Emily and Mackenzie Sanders, Terry and
Caroline Bauer, Karen and Mike McCoy—for their patience and understand-
ing as he balanced his personal and professional obligations during such trying
years. He is equally thankful for the support of many dear friends and comrades,
especially Steven Thrasher, Tej Nagaraja, and Sam Markwell. He is grateful to
the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU—especially
Rodney Benson, Brett Gary, Erica Robles-Anderson, Marita Sturken, Aurora
Wallace, and Angela Wu—for the opportunity to return to New York, and for
the warm welcome back. His contributions to this book benefitted from the
guidance of and intellectual engagement with Cristina Beltrán, Andrew Ross,
Brian Ray, and Louie Dean Valencia-García, among many others. Finally, A.J. is
forever grateful to Maria Arettines, whose loving encouragement is a resilient
source of strength that bolsters this and all of his work.
Lastly, we wish to extend our sincere thanks to Hallie Stebbins, David
McBride, Holly Mitchell, and Alphonsa James, and to our anonymous review-
ers for shepherding this book through the production process. And of course,
this book could not exist without our contributors. We are very grateful for all
their diligent and careful research, their sharp analysis, and their persistence and
patience throughout many rounds of reviews and revisions. All the contributors
in this volume graciously served as reviewers for each other and offered com-
ments that thickened the linkages and conversation throughout these chapters.
1
Taking Conservative News Seriously

A . J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler
In February 1962, CBS News broadcast a special report on right-wing extremism

in the United States—among the earliest televisual exposés of certain key figures
of the modern conservative movement. Thunder on the Right began with footage
of members of a Minutemen militia unit who, correspondent Eric Sevareid deri-
sively noted, were “prowling for communists on the banks of a Midwest river.”
The hour-long documentary featured footage from meetings of the Christian
Anti-Communist Crusade and John Birch Society, as well as interviews with con-
troversial but influential right-wing luminaries like Fred Schwartz, Billy James
Hargis, H. L. Hunt, and Birch Society founder Robert Welch. Distinguishing
these “extremists” from “more responsible” conservatives like Arizona senator
Barry Goldwater, Sevareid warned that the “vibrant vibrations” produced by the
“flapping of the right-wing” risked destabilizing US political culture at best and
inciting violence at worst. Thunder, he warned, might “create lightning.”
Thunder on the Right epitomizes the tone and tenor of a good deal of journalis-
tic and scholarly criticism of the modern conservative movement in general, and
right-wing media in particular (e.g., Crawford 1980). Airing the same month
that William F. Buckley’s National Review published its denunciation of Welch,
the broadcast helped popularize the notion that the conservative movement
could be divided between a “radical” fringe and a “responsible” mainstream.
Associating the radical Right with “thunder,” it initiated an ongoing tendency
among critics to rely on metaphors of commotion and clamor while describ-
ing the impacts of right-wing media and media activism. In their highly influ-
ential study Manufacturing Consent, for example, Edward Herman and Noam
Chomsky (1988) accused conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media of
generating “flak,” disciplining the news media when it grew too critical of capi-
talism or US imperialism. David Brock (2004), an ex-conservative and founder
of the progressive watchdog Media Matters for America, has been raising aware-
ness of what he calls the Republican “noise machine” for the better part of two
1
2 A. J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler
decades. Meanwhile, political communication scholars Kathleen Hall Jamieson

and Joseph Cappella (2008) have identified a conservative “echo chamber,” in
which conservative media outlets like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the Wall
Street Journal combine to set the news agenda for their conservative consumers
while inoculating them against ideology-contradicting facts and arguments.
Such metaphors—thunder, flak, noise machines, echo chambers—invite
us to associate political communication on the right with cacophony. News on
the Right begins from a different premise. We contend that a fuller understand-
ing of right-wing media, and its political cultural byproducts, can be achieved
by treating these phenomena as less disorienting than meaning making and
deeply interwoven into many conservatives’ daily lives and political sensibilities.
Indeed, since just about the dawn of mass communication, right-wing media
producers have seamlessly blended reporting with commentary, narrating the
news of the day from a perspective informed by their ideological commitments,
as well as more circumstantial partisan reactions.
Conservative News Is Not New

While partisan news cultures, including those associated with right-wing politi-
cal parties and ideologies, can be traced back at least to the late eighteenth cen-
tury (Pasley 2003), and indeed across the globe, this book aims to shed light on
the interrelated news cultures associated with the modern conservative move-
ment. These modern conservative news cultures are differentiated from other
news cultures in part due to their particular antagonistic relation to news pro-
duced according to professional journalistic standards and values. While several
components of modern journalistic objectivity were developed during the parti-
san press era (Mindich 1998), they were consolidated as journalistic profession-
alism in the early twentieth century (Schudson 2001; Schudson and Anderson
2009), not long before free market ideologues began organizing a nascent con-
servative movement against the New Deal (Phillips-Fein 2009). That profes-
sionalism evolved into a “high modern” journalistic ideology that achieved true
hegemony in the postwar decades (Hallin 1994; Pickard 2014)—a period coin-
ciding with the growth of the modern conservative movement and the construc-
tion of its early mediasphere.
While Father Charles Coughlin perhaps looms largest in the collective mem-
ory of early right-wing media, he was but one of dozens of radio commentators
who opposed the New Deal and contested the popular front in the 1930s and
1940s. Network-syndicated broadcasters like Gabriel Heatter, H. V. Kaltenborn,
Henry J. Taylor, Fulton Lewis Jr., and George Sokolsky—each with back-
grounds as newspaper reporters or columnists—filled the national airwaves
Tak ing Cons er vative News S e r i ously 3
with right-spun news. The same era saw a broad array of reformers and critics
charging that monopolistic conditions in the newspaper industry were yielding
conservative press bias, oft personified in the figures of syndicated columnist
Westbrook Pegler and Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick. In addi-
tion to mainstream newspapers, pro-business and anti-communist interpreta-
tions of the news flowed freely from small journals of opinion like Human Events
(1944–present) and Plain Talk (1946–1950) to more widely circulated periodi-
cals like American Mercury (1924–1980) to the largest mass-market weekly of
them all, Reader’s Digest (1922–present). Early progressive media critics, from
George Seldes to Dorothy Parker’s Voice of Freedom Committee, exhaustively
documented and contested this burgeoning right-wing mediasphere in the
1940s, sparking some of the most robust media reform efforts in US history to
date (see Pickard 2014).
In spite of efforts to counter it, right-wing media blossomed in the early
1950s—fueled initially by McCarthyism and by the vast wealth of oil tycoon
H. L. Hunt, whose Facts Forum (1952–1956) radio, television, and print prod-
ucts launched or boosted the careers of some of the most prominent conser-
vative journalists and media personalities of the 1960s and 1970s (Bauer
2017). With his launch of National Review in 1955, aided over the airwaves by
Clarence Manion and in book publishing by Henry Regnery (Hemmer 2016),
Buckley laid the cornerstone of what would become, ironically, a sort of early
“establishment” conservative media (see Lane, this volume, for a discussion of
anti-establishment themes in the early years of the National Review). While the
National Review often framed itself as the center of the conservative universe,
considerable right-wing media production exceeded its orbit. Despite being for-
mally exiled by Buckley in 1962, the John Birch Society remained a continuous
source of conservative pamphlets, magazines, and newsletters. The 1960s and
1970s saw considerable rightwing anti-communist and white supremacist com-
mentary from popular evangelical broadcasters like Billy James Hargis and Carl
McIntire, not to mention H. L. Hunt’s Life Line, all of whom similarly iterated
what Heather Hendershot (2011) describes as an “ultra” conservative discourse
outside Buckley’s sanction.
By the mid-1970s, a sort of rival conservative media establishment emerged
at the hands of New Right activists, including most prominently Paul Weyrich
and Richard Viguerie (see DiBranco, this volume). Applying direct mail prin-
ciples to political movement building, the New Right formed an array of conser-
vative single-issue groups. These groups—like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum,
which successfully campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment, and the
National Rifle Association, which has reshaped popular and judicial under-
standings of the Second Amendment—played important roles as newsmakers,
setting and framing the terms of mass-mediated national debates concerning
race, gender, sexuality, and class, leading up to and throughout the Reagan
administration. Meanwhile, New Right–affiliated groups like the Eagle Forum,
Accuracy in Media, and later the Media Research Center played a considerable
role in promoting and gathering evidence claiming that the movement was beset
by a “liberal media” establishment (Bauer 2017).
No longer constrained by the National Review’s aspirations for an intellectual
tenor, the New Right stoked the embers of a populist conservatism that flour-
ished in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine
made space for political talk radio innovators like Rush Limbaugh. As conserva-
tive mass media began achieving commercial viability in the 1990s, talk radio
hosts like Limbaugh and national media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and
Fox News soon eclipsed movement-based conservatism as the primary impe-
tus of news on the right ( Jamieson and Cappella 2008). This trend continued
as conservative news blossomed in many varieties online. In the early years of
the web, established conservative institutions took the lead in founding online
forums and news sites, such as Townhall, an online news community launched
by the Heritage Foundation in 1995. Yet, many more web denizens would visit
the online aggregator the Drudge Report, founded by the idiosyncratic conserva-
tive Matt Drudge. As more users turned to the Internet for news and commen-
tary in the early 2000s, news entrepreneurs from Andrew Breitbart to Michelle
Malkin to Ben Shapiro have proven conservatives to be nimble in adopting
emerging media forms from blogs and podcasts to online video streams. These
sometimes unruly conservative media stars and online communities have put
increasing pressures on the Republican Party “from below,” influencing the con-
tours of conservative politics.
Defining “Conservative News Cultures”

For much of the twentieth century, when professional journalism was defined
according to “high modern” values like impartiality and objectivity, many
viewed right-wing news with trepidation. From Robert McCormick to Richard
Viguerie, from Fulton Lewis Jr. to Rush Limbaugh, right-wing publishers and
broadcasters were often accused of irresponsibility or unprofessional behavior at
best, demagoguery at worst. All the while, sympathetic readers and listeners have
relied on various mixtures of both journalistic professional and right-wing media
outlets to make sense of the news of the day. In some cases, the gap between
how a particular issue or event was reported by mainstream news media and by
a right-wing commentator may have proved instrumental in helping consum-
ers realize their previously unacknowledged ideological dispositions. In other
cases, consuming right-wing news may have allowed self-identified ideologues
to imagine themselves as part of a broader right-wing public or movement. In yet

other cases, conservative commentators may have helped draw in new publics by
speaking to grievances and frustrations in novel ways—especially to those frus-
trations not addressed by competing pundits or activists. From the late 1940s
onward, as “conservative” became an increasingly salient identification among
those on the right, consumption of right-wing periodicals and radio broadcasts
helped mobilize and synchronize self-identified conservatives not only around
abstract ideological beliefs but also through the daily travails of mediated politi-
cal conflict; it also helped to cultivate an attachment to conservatism as a social
identity (Mason 2018). This quotidian production and consumption of con-
servative news and the circulation of that news within and beyond the modern
conservative movement combine to produce what we term conservative news
cultures.
This book’s aim is to bring focus to conservative news cultures as a crucial
area for academic inquiry. We write at a moment when the vast power of con-
servative news cultures to affect the circulation and norms of political discourse
could not be rendered more starkly. Most days, Donald J. Trump tunes in to Fox
& Friends, a cable talk show whose sometimes conspiratorial news judgment is
often reflected in the president’s trademark early morning tweets. Those tweets
are themselves treated as news—the controversial ones covered breathlessly by
mainstream political reporters across mediums. The president’s supporters like
and retweet his posts, spreading their content among likeminded friends and
followers across platforms, while his detractors retweet with snarky rejoinders.
Often rejoinder tweets themselves go viral, giving quaternary life to bits and
pieces of news originating in the judgment of Fox News reporters, editors, and
commentators.
While conservative news cultures are by no means unique to our hypermedi-
ated present, Trump’s tweet storms offer an example that keenly illustrates the
multifaceted nature of this object of analysis. Understanding the phenomenon
requires inquiry into no fewer than four sites of meaning-making activity: news
production, news consumption and sharing practices, the dialectical relation-
ship between news producers and audiences, and the agency of newsmakers.
Studies foregrounding a single site will not necessarily shed light on others.
For example, an ethnography of the Fox & Friends production process would
yield little insight into how average viewers experience watching the program,
let alone how Trump chooses what to tweet from it. Likewise, a rhetorical analy-
sis of Trump tweets might have little to say about the news values of the sources
he incorporates into those tweets, not to mention the expectations of those
who consume news vicariously through them. It is only practical that various
researchers will concentrate their attention on particular sites of conservative
news culture. Yet, our hope is that as scholars continue to elucidate particular
cases, they will increasingly build interconnections and render insights that span
broader circuits of conservative news production and consumption.
As the interdisciplinary variety of this volume attests, to study conservative
news cultures is not to adhere to a particular theoretical or methodological
approach or tradition. Like Stuart Allan (2010), we use the term news culture to
avoid the sometimes rigid dichotomy between media and society, emphasizing
the way in which both objects mutually constitute one another. We pluralize
the term to foreground the variegated byproducts of this co-constitution—
news varies according to the words and actions of newsmakers, according to the
judgments of particular reporters and outlets, according to cultural and politi-
cal economic structures of circulation, and according to the myriad interpretive
frameworks employed by audiences. A particular news culture results from con-
sistent practices or patterns of meaning making that emerge between and among
these sites of production, circulation, and consumption.
For our purposes, a news culture is conservative insofar as it involves forms
of media production, circulation, consumption, or identification by institu-
tions and actors who are associated with the extended infrastructure of or
discourse produced by the modern conservative movement in the United
States. That movement—initially composed of neoliberal, traditionalist, and
anti-communist intellectual strands—cohered in the mid-1940s and has
been a recognizable, if historically contingent, force in US political culture
and beyond ever since (Nash 1998; Burns 2004). There is a long-standing
tendency, epitomized most recently by intellectual historian Corey Robin,
to reduce modern conservatism to a single drive: “the felt experience of hav-
ing power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back” (Robin 2017, 4).
While we do not discount the impact of this reactionary impulse in foster-
ing conservative thought and activism in the United States and beyond, it is
too narrow a framework for understanding the capaciousness of news on the
right. Indeed, from its outset modern conservatism has been composed of
an array of oft-feuding personalities and ideological tendencies. The move-
ment’s internal contradictions, both personal and political, have historically
resulted in a panoply of media outlets with varied and oft-competing ideo-
logical projects (neoliberal, neoconservative, paleoconservative, etc.), policy
emphases (anti-abortion, pro-gun rights, etc.), and styles and tones (from
the high-brow National Review, to the middle-brow Conservative Digest, to
low-brow talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh). Far from “noise,” such con-
servative media plurality results in many discrete, though often overlapping
and intersecting, news cultures—ways of making sense of daily occurrences,
patterned to support, justify, or otherwise resonate with the various beliefs
historically associated with modern conservatism.
An Imperative for Journalism Studies and Beyond

While multiple disciplines have unique contributions to make to the study of
conservative news cultures, the interdisciplinary field of journalism studies
has a central role to play. Michael Schudson (2000, 56) once observed that,
despite the wide variety of societies in which it can be found, journalism con-
sistently functions as the “social coordination of individuals and groups through
shared symbols and meanings.” He added that, among other traits, the practice
of journalism nearly always presents itself as conveying information and com-
mentary on contemporary affairs, through a discourse that takes itself to be
publicly important and truthful, while addressing a dispersed public audience
(57). Journalism studies scholars, who have embraced this capacious view of
journalism, have ventured far beyond the positivist approaches that dominated
much of journalism and mass communication research of the mid-twentieth
century. These researchers have cultivated a wide variety of intellectual methods
and theoretical frameworks that will prove helpful in analyzing the institutional
dynamics, meaning-making and identity-constructing processes, and social-
coordinating aspects of conservative news cultures.
To take conservative news seriously, however, journalism studies scholar-
ship must continue expanding its horizons and scope. As John Nerone (2013,
17) has put it, much of journalism studies has centered its analysis on “a his-
torically specific form of journalism in historically specific news organizations,”
namely, journalism as “it is exercised by professional journalists working in
industrially organized newsrooms under the supervision of editors, usually in
newspapers.” As the professional newspaper—and high modern journalism,
more generally—loses its once hegemonic social role, journalism studies schol-
ars have rightly expanded their focus to include other journalistic forms, both
the emergent and the long neglected. To make sense of the wide range of institu-
tions and practices through which publics assemble narratives of political life
and coordinate social action, journalism scholars are taking more seriously lit-
erary journalism (Forde 2008; Bak and Reynolds 2011), left social movement
journalism (Atton and Hamilton 2008; Downing 2000), community and ethnic
journalism (Matsaganis, Katz, and Ball-Rokeach 2011; Lauterer 2006), tabloid
journalism (Gripsrud 2000; Zelizer 2009), and other genres. Yet, journalism
scholars have been slow to recognize conservative news and commentary as a
rich site of inquiry (Bauer 2018).
As right-wing populist movements have shaken the political landscape in
countries across the globe, ignoring conservative and right-leaning news cultures
is no longer an option for journalism studies. Not only does conservative news
play a powerful role informing its audiences, but also it provides a key vantage
point for analyzing the social rituals, institutions, and sense-making processes
constituting the journalistic field more generally. Research into conservative
news will feed into analysis of key problematics and themes in journalism stud-
ies, such as the analysis of how journalists establish cultural authority and legiti-
macy (Carlson 2017; Zelizer 1990), shifting conceptions of professionalization
(Waisbord 2013; Schudson and Anderson 2009), relations between news out-
lets and their publics (Nord 2001; Usher 2016), news institutions and agenda
setting in changing media environments (Guo and McCombs 2015), and
emerging work into the affective and emotional dimensions of news production
and sharing (Papacharissi 2015; Wahl-Jorgensen 2019). Research into conserva-
tive news will also introduce new questions regarding the political economy of
media, as much of this research has focused on commercial and state-funded
media, while conservatives have relied heavily on patronage networks to build
much of their news infrastructure. In areas of overlap among journalism studies
and political communication, historically rich and nuanced accounts of conser-
vative news cultures will have much to add to analyses of mediated partisanship.
At the same time, greater engagement with existing research in journalism
and media studies will offer richer accounts of meso-and macro-level contexts
in which conservative news cultures take shape. Spurts of growth and change
in conservative news institutions cannot be isolated from the cultural processes
and contexts in which they are enmeshed. The enormous popularity and influ-
ence of the Drudge Report, for example, cannot be separated from the decline of
professional journalism’s hegemony, the burgeoning of online citizen journal-
ism, and the powerful dynamics of online attention that favor sites establishing
prominence early in the development of a digital genre.
We intend this volume to serve as a step toward more reflexivity and greater
interconnection in this nascent interdisciplinary subfield. As this field grows, we
hope to see it become an area of scholarly debate and dialogue where scholars
scrutinize and build upon each other’s theories. Centering conservative news
cultures will also give life to new problematics rising directly from this line of
inquiry. Yet, researchers studying conservative news will still have to navigate key
tensions surrounding structure and agency. Popular and scholarly critiques of
right-wing media can too easily slip into “magic bullet” discourses—presuming
conservatives are merely hapless dupes of the machinations of right-wing media
owners and producers. While this concern deserves critical scrutiny, so too do
opposing assumptions of market populism that frame conservative news out-
lets as merely reflecting their consumers’ pre-existing tastes and dispositions.
Figuring out why particular media circulate widely among certain groups and
the significance of such circulation requires thinking of media outlets as “nei-
ther mere servants of demand nor overlords capable of dictating exactly what
news content consumers must accept” (Nadler 2016, 10). Scholars must grapple
with the negotiations that occur among conservative news outlets, their audi-
ences, and the larger array of political and social actors that shape narratives of
public life.
An Opening Salvo
The chapters in this book each explore particular conservative news cultures
while emphasizing how their analysis fits within the conservative news subfield.
This collection focuses mostly on conservative news cultures centered in the
United States, though several chapters speak to questions of theory and method
that transcend national context. Our contributors draw on cultural history,
political sociology, cultural studies, and rhetorical analysis to study conservative
news cultures across several decades and tied to outlets representing multiple
media formats, from print to television to online communities. These authors
speak to intersecting questions and topics ranging from the origins of the notion
of “liberal media” to connections between conservative media structures and
movements to the impacts of conservative news cultures on political life in the
United States and beyond. We have organized the chapters around three loose
thematic sections: mobilizing political identities, building conservative media
infrastructure, and legitimizing conservative discourses. No bright lines separate
these themes, and there are considerable overlaps among them. The chapters
in this book take up each theme as situated in different historical moments or
media formats, so each section provides an opportunity for comparative per-
spectives and historical depth along one axis of inquiry.
The first four chapters focus on the construction of imagined communities
and political identities. Much of the research on conservative media to date has
focused on the beliefs and ideologies such outlets promote. These chapters turn,
instead, to explore how conservative media have attempted, with varying suc-
cess, to foster a sense of community or collective political identification among
their audiences. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, conservative media
outlets have often promoted a sense of conservatism not only as a set of prin-
ciples, policy preferences, or beliefs but also as an integral aspect of personal
identity. Conservative media negotiate the boundaries of conservative identity
as it relates to others identities—most notably race, gender, class, religion, and
regional loyalties. Each of these chapters illustrates why much of the emotional
attachment to and passion for conservatism may be understood through the
prism of identity. Political psychologists have increasingly conceptualized the
formation of political identities as a crucial factor animating political activity
(e.g., Mason 2018; Huddy and Bankert 2017). Yet, we should be cautious not to
assume that the processes that drive people to take on political identities must be
similar across social contexts. Analyzing how conservative news helps formulate
and mobilize political identities may provide critical insights on social processes
that intensify (or de-intensify) emotional attachments to political identities in
particular, historical moments.
In “ ‘From a Christian Perspective’: News/Talk in Evangelical Mass Media,”
Mark Ward Sr. examines the power of news programs produced by contempo-
rary networks of conservative evangelical broadcasters. Ward argues that the
programming of these networks positions a “Christian worldview” as a conser-
vative political identity inseparable from religious practice and Christian modes
of apprehending the world. Ward analyzes how conservative Christian news
producers lay claim to a legitimacy that is undergirded by biblical authority as
they set news agendas and frame stories. Ward situates contemporary Christian
radio within a long history of evangelical struggles over access to broadcasting
resources and locates the current genre formation of evangelical news within the
United States’ deregulated and highly consolidated broadcast markets.
In his chapter on “Containing ‘Country Music Marxism,’ ” Reece Peck tracks
the populist stylistic resonances between country western music and Fox News
Channel programming. Using country musician John Rich’s 2009 song “Detroit”
as a case study, Peck demonstrates how Fox News employed its unique mix of
tabloid aesthetics and populist epistemic appeals to conscribe potentially pro-
gressive interpretations of Rich’s song. In doing so, Peck illuminates how Fox
endows its conservative political news brand with affective power and social
meaning. Tracking the migration of country style from the music sector to the
news sector, Peck elucidates how political-taste alignments factor into conser-
vative news cultures. His chapter serves as a call for greater scholarly attention
to the way conservative news actively partisanizes national taste divisions while
relying on those very divisions in framing its news coverage.
In “Weaponizing Victimhood: Discourses of Oppression and the Maintenance
of Supremacy on the Right,” Lee Bebout analyzes a rhetoric of “weaponized vic-
timhood” that he argues plays a crucial role in uniting disparate factions of the
contemporary American Right. Weaponized victimhood speaks to a felt sense
of loss of power and esteem among social groups facing challenges to their tradi-
tionally privileged status positions. In Bebout’s account, this expression of griev-
ance takes on a hyperbolic form through assertions that groups such as whites,
men, and Christians face great social oppression. They are portrayed as victims
of such projected threats as a “War on Christmas” and “feminazi” activists.
Bebout argues that such victimization narratives circulate across various types of
conservative and right-wing media—from Fox News to alt right and men’s rights
websites. A common rhetoric of victimization cultivates a shared affective sensi-
bility among groups ranging from avowed white supremacists to anti-feminists
to others reacting against perceived challenge to their social power and standing.
In her chapter on “NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics,”

Dawn Gilpin considers the National Rifle Association (NRA) as not merely a
lobbying outfit, trade association, or hobbyist group, but as a full-fledged media-
sphere. Since the early 2000s, the NRA has aggressively expanded its footprint
within the broader right-wing media environment—it publishes four print
magazines and a highly integrated array of micro-targeted online print and video
content, social media platforms, and original online television programming.
Via a content analysis of NRA.org, a site that aggregates and prioritizes content
from across the group’s multimedia platforms, Gilpin employs critical discourse
analysis to illuminate the site’s populist themes and rhetorical styles. She finds
that the NRA combines the trappings of news genres and right-wing discourses
with populist modes of expression to amplify and reinforce the deep affective
ties between gun ownership and conservative political identity.
The middle three chapters focus on the construction of conservative news
infrastructure. Despite the well-worn association between conservatism and tra-
ditionalism, conservative media has been a dynamic force, often tapping into
affordances of new technologies and leveraging shifts in regulations with as
much, or arguably more, fervor and skill as counterparts on the left. Scholarship
on conservative news needs to extend its analysis beyond conservative news
texts, their producers, and the audiences who make meaning out of those texts.
Scholars must also grapple with how conservative media structures interact
with broader media landscapes and other facets of political life. In a commer-
cial media system, the dominate understanding of why particular news outlets
spread and thrive is frequently assumed to be a matter of meritocracy: the kinds
of news that most match a community’s tastes will succeed in the marketplace.
Yet, supply does not merely chase demand. Building an influential news outlet
entails devoting resources and investing in efforts to mobilize audiences and cul-
tivate their tastes and expectations (Nadler 2016). The chapters in this section
offer insights on how conservatives have built their own news infrastructures,
how their infrastructures have influenced broader circuits of news flow, and the
conditions that have enabled both.
In “Making Media Safe for Corporate Power: Market Libertarian Discourse
in the 1940s and Beyond,” Victor Pickard argues that a corporate libertarian
vision of media policy established the discursive terrain in which conservative
media ultimately thrived. The corporate libertarian approach conceives of news
media as a commodity—rather than a public resource—best left under private
control and ownership. Pickard argues that this vision became a hegemonic
common sense that came to dominate US media policy discourses—thanks,
in part, to a propagandistic influence campaign executed by corporate interests.
This led to insufficient resources invested in a democratic news system. Such a
policy orientation created conditions for a commercial media system driven by
a competition to meet consumer demand. Yet, as Pickard suggests, it also cre-

ated a space for right-wing media activists to mobilize and cultivate conservative
publics through outlets propped up by patronage networks and ideologically
motivated venture capital.
In her chapter on “Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure,” Alex
DiBranco expands our thinking of conservative media beyond traditional forms.
DiBranco notes that, while a first generation of conservative media activists
invested in more or less traditional media enterprises (e.g., magazines, newslet-
ters, radio programming), by the 1970s movement activists associated with the
New Right were investing in think tanks and foundations—not only diversify-
ing the conservative movement infrastructure but also complicating the varie-
gated means of sourcing and circulating conservative news and commentary.
DiBranco demonstrates how the movement’s turn toward nonprofit organiza-
tional structures in the 1970s enabled its institutional proliferation. She maps
the result—a dizzying array of funders, organizations, publications, and activists
whose efforts continue to wield outsized influence over both the conservative
movement and the news cultures that surround it.
In her chapter on “The British Right-Wing Mainstream and the European
Referendum,” Angela Phillips uses the 2016 Brexit campaign as a window into
how the right-wing establishment press in the United Kingdom influences the
country’s broad political agenda. While scholars have tended to emphasize
the outsized role of the BBC as a “trust anchor” (Wessells, Ekelin, Kemp, and
Forsberg 2018), whose journalistic professionalism mitigates some of the polar-
izing effects of the United Kingdom’s partisan tabloid print culture, Phillips
demonstrates how the latter played a crucial agenda-setting role in the European
referendum debate—exploiting the Remain/Leave dichotomy, and the BBC’s
“strategic balance,” to frame the debate within discursive limits set by the con-
servative elite. The result further undermined trust in British broadcasting while
largely excluding organized labor from the referendum debate. Phillips’s chapter
provides interesting comparative fodder for scholars of right-wing news in the
US context, as the EU referendum in many ways replicated the structural con-
ditions that underpin the two-party horse race coverage common in US main-
stream political reporting.
This book’s final four chapters turn toward the broad discursive templates that
conservative journalists, commentators, and media activists have developed for
understanding their work and worldviews against the backdrop of professional
journalistic norms and historical shifts in common sense concerning social
issues. As discussed at this chapter’s outset, the early conservative movement
faced a national media narrative that depicted its leadership and grassroots both
as composed of histrionic figures toiling at the political fringe. Attempting to
combat this narrative, conservative news cultures positioned themselves within
a broader mediated terrain of respectability politics. Whether by policing the

boundaries of “responsible” conservatism—especially as they pertain to con-
spiratorial analysis and the shifting social acceptance of overt appeals to white
supremacy—or by identifying and narrating the workings of a “liberal media”
elite, conservative movement leaders developed discursive frameworks for
understanding politics that have long since taken on lives of their own beyond
their initial movement context.
Among the central issues driving the conservative movement’s discursive pro-
ductivity was the question of race and racism in the United States. In his chapter,
“National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights Memory: 1968–
2016,” Robert Greene II analyzes the National Review’s shifting narratives of the
contentious relationship between the modern conservative movement, Martin
Luther King Jr., and the broader civil rights movement. National Review writers
largely opposed the civil rights movement up until the mid-1960s, casting Black
freedom activists and their goals as threats to civilized order and the spirit of the
US Constitution. Yet, the National Review would ultimately take on a leading
role in reconsidering the conservative movement’s animosity toward King and
civil rights—drawing parallels between conservative principles and civil rights
claims, and even making fraught color-blind conservative claims to King’s legacy.
The National Review played a crucial role in constructing the “liberal media”
trope in the mid-1950s, as Julie Lane’s chapter in this volume, “Cultivating
Distrust of the Mainstream Media,” compellingly demonstrates. Lane traces
the English origins of “the Establishment” as a rhetorical figure and shows
how National Review writers successfully appropriated it, constructing a unify-
ing, besieged mentality that opened space for the nascent conservative media
countersphere. These writers placed a critique of media bias within a broader
narrative of a smug and elite “Liberal Establishment” that operated across many
institutions to, in Buckley’s words, “set the bounds of permissible opinions.”
Through closely analyzing two early National Review columns dedicated to
media criticism along with internal discussions among key writers, Lane adds
nuance to previous historical accounts of the origins of this pillar of conserva-
tive news discourse. She notes that the National Review made a case of liberal
bias in media that was not solely tied to a critique of the professional objectivity.
Critics writing in the magazine saw purportedly objective professional coverage
as tainted with the same bias as liberal journals of opinion. She argues that the
National Review “claimed that individual media outlets did not simply tilt left on
some issues but worked together to demand conformity with the entire liberal
agenda.”
Tackling the continued existence of the “liberal media” trope head on,
Anthony DiMaggio’s chapter—“Slanting the News: Media Bias and Its Effects”—
investigates whether consumption of Fox, MSNBC, and CNN is associated with
formation of conservative or liberal political attitudes. Analyzing public opinion

data collected by the Pew Research Center between 2004 and 2016, DiMaggio’s
statistical regression analysis finds little evidence of a liberal polarizing effect for
CNN and MSNBC consumption on political attitudes. On the other hand, he
finds both selective exposure and polarization to be at work on the right, par-
ticularly in relation to Fox News consumption. DiMaggio’s findings corroborate
those of network analysts (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018) who have identi-
fied a structural asymmetry in political polarization within online media—with
right-wing news audiences more insular and their preferred media more ideo-
logically self-reinforcing than their counterparts on the liberal left. DiMaggio
clarifies that asymmetrical polarization in general, and conservative news in
particular, has measurable effects on political attitude formation among cable
television consumers, not only consumers of online content.
In his chapter, “Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream,” Mark Major
further expands our understanding of “liberal media” discourse by analyzing
its historical formation in terms of public sphere theory. Advancing a discur-
sive institutionalist methodological approach, rooted in sustained analysis of
the actors, ideas, and institutions that give conservative news its cultural form
and force, Major asks: how did the notion of the “liberal media” come to have
such influence within and beyond conservative news cultures? Major’s approach
explicitly connects conservative news infrastructures with the production of
“liberal media” discourse. He contends that conservative journalists, commen-
tators, and media activists began conceptualizing the “liberal media” within the
institutions of the conservative countersphere by the 1950s and early 1960s.
Once this discourse had been crystalized and legitimized among conservative
commentators and their eager audiences, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and
other prominent Republican voices promoted its circulation within the national
public sphere, where it became a template for understanding and judging profes-
sional journalism far beyond the conservative countersphere.
The book concludes with a mapping of several lines of academic inquiry
that, we contend, speak to the yet-unrealized field of conservative news stud-
ies. Scholars have been researching various components of conservative news
cultures for decades, but too often disciplinary silos, differing methodological
assumptions, and a lack of standardized terminology have precluded the sort
of focused scholarly dialogue that typically constitutes a field. Our final chapter
highlights the extant disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates that a robust field
of conservative news studies would ideally both weave together and build upon.
These chapters are by no means exhaustive of the wide array of outlets, audi-
ences, and interactions that comprise conservative news cultures. No one vol-
ume could conclusively document and analyze all conservative news and its
myriad impacts. Instead, we intend this volume to serve as an opening salvo in
a growing interdisciplinary conversation about conservative news, both in the

United States and hopefully around the world. Wherever readers spy a gap in
this volume’s coverage, we encourage them to take strides to fill it. While the
modern conservative movement knows no shortage of egoists, and indeed
prides itself on individualism, conservative news cultures are the work of mul-
tiple generations of conservative publishers, editors, reporters, commentators,
readers, listeners, and viewers—all working collectively to make conservative
meaning out of the news of their day. Understanding the scale and nuance of
conservative news cultures will require a similarly collective endeavor on the
part of researchers.
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2
“From a Christian Perspective”

News/Talk in Evangelical Mass Media
Mark Ward Sr .
The literature on the conservative media establishment is extensive and growing.

Yet, after the televangelism scandals of the late 1980s and presumed “rise and
fall” (Hadden 1993) of the genre, the conservative religious media establishment
has received less attention. A few scholars have mined the “electronic church”
for artifacts of evangelical culture (Apostolidis 2000; Hendershot 2004; Kintz
and Lesage 1998). Yet the focus of these studies on evangelical programming
as cultural artifact, though valuable, necessarily takes less account of the elec-
tronic church as a living media enterprise whose product is subject over time
to changes in technology and regulation. Far from fading after the scandals of
the 1980s, the electronic church has seen rapid ownership concentration due
to media deregulation (Ward 2009, 2012, 2013, 2018a) and the emergence of
religious media oligopolies that now dominate a genre that serves the one in
four Americans who identify as evangelical Christians (Pew Research Center
2015) and is consumed daily by one in five adults (Barna Group 2005). Thus,
while earlier studies focused on producers of evangelical programming and were
written largely before the effects of media deregulation and industry consolida-
tion were fully felt, the present chapter focuses on the networks that distribute
programming and whose oligopolistic position makes possible a centralization
and homogenization of the evangelical message to an unprecedented degree.
White evangelical Protestantism is, by percent of population, the nation’s
single largest religious tradition (Putnam and Campbell 2010). As an institution
of American evangelicalism, today’s electronic church encompasses 10 national
radio networks that each control between 100 and 500 outlets; some 30 pro-
grammers each syndicated on up to 2,000 affiliates and who attract up to 6 mil-
lion weekly listeners; more than 3,400 radio stations (one-fifth of the US total)
that air religious teaching, talk, or music formats; a dozen television networks
17
18 M a r k Wa r d S r .
carried by all major cable and satellite providers with a reach of 100 million
households; and some 50 syndicated programmers with weekly audiences of up
to 7 million viewers (Ward 2016). And through the increasing convergence of
broadcast and digital media, millions more access this content on demand as
conglomerates now stream across every digital media platform (Ward 2018a).
The leading evangelical broadcast network alone generates 107 million monthly
app sessions, 31 million monthly computer sessions, 42 million Facebook fans,
and 15 million email subscribers through its web-based platforms (Salem Web
Network 2018).
While preaching and music remain staples of the religious genre, media con-
solidation and the rise of large evangelical networks has made production and
distribution of Christian conservative news/talk programming a major empha-
sis. The Christian Broadcasting Network’s (2018) nightly CBN News draws one
million daily viewers through its carriage on multiple cable and satellite chan-
nels that reach 97 percent of US television markets. “Christian radio,” however,
serves an even greater agenda-setting function for evangelicals (Wrench 2016).
Top-of-the-hour news is distributed by Salem Media Group (2018a) to 1,100
affiliates “in every major market and in all 50 states” and by USA Radio (2018)
to 500 affiliates, while the American Family News Network (2018) claims 1,200
broadcast, print, and online affiliates for its daily newscast. In talk radio, though
evangelicals are fans of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, these two conser-
vative talkers address moral and cultural concerns less than 5 percent of the
time (Mort 2010). So evangelicals tune in by the millions to hear a “Christian
perspective” on social issues and other news through the nine daily talk shows
produced by the Salem Radio Network, the six by American Family Radio, the
five by USA Radio, and daily syndicated talk shows such as Focus on the Family
(2018), which is aired by more than 2,000 affiliates and attracts 6.3 million
weekly listeners; Jay Sekulow Live, heard on 1,050 affiliates (American Center
for Law and Justice 2018); and Washington Watch, carried by nearly 400 affiliates
(Family Research Council 2018).
This vast repertoire of evangelical news/talk programming, however, must
navigate a paradox. When discussing the news of the day, “economic conserva-
tives ground their authority in empirical rationality, even if the ‘outrage indus-
try’ thrives on exaggeration and misrepresentation of the endless statistics
they recite. Religious conservatives, however, anchor their worldview in faith”
(Sumser 2016, 107). The latter, then, must play off empirically based secular
rationality against divinely revealed religious authority. The paradox is rhe-
torically overcome, as will be seen, by employing the coded phrase “Christian
worldview,” which, in turn, furnishes a warrant for filtering all news through
the prism of an authoritative, divinely inspired, and “inerrant” Bible. This code
enables American evangelicals to sustain themselves as a “rhetorical community”
Tal k in Evang elical Ma ss Media 19
(Miller 1993, 1994) distinct from economic, small-government, and libertarian

conservatives. Thus, while teaching, preaching, and music programming sustain
the community’s inward application of a “Christian worldview” to private life,
news/talk sustains outward application to public life.
Waiting for the “Right” Moment

Though today’s format of evangelical news/talk is a creature of media deregula-
tion since the 1990s, the genre also demonstrates how “evangelical mass media
of the 21st century are best understood . . . in terms of continuities within the
American evangelical subculture that predate electronic media, span all media
forms, and guide the community today” (Steiner 2016, 7). After the public
humiliation of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” evangelicals retreated inward
and, during the second and third quarters of the twentieth century, focused
on building their own subcultural institutions (Balmer 2010). Yet the matura-
tion of those institutions was a necessary condition for what came next: “The
infrastructure the evangelicals had constructed in earnest following the Scopes
trial—colleges, seminaries, publishing houses, media concerns—was by [the
1970s] sufficiently established so that it could provide a foundation for evangeli-
cals’ return to the public square” (55).
In the early days of radio, religious broadcasters’ opportunities to address
political issues were constrained by multiple concerns. Congress in 1927 man-
dated that the “airwaves” are publicly owned, so that broadcasters must obtain
federal licenses on the condition that they serve the public. Under the business-
minded Coolidge and Hoover administrations, however, the new Federal Radio
Commission (FRC) emphasized commercial development of radio and for
a time actively considered classifying religious stations as propaganda outlets
that served only a small segment of the public (Ward 2017). In fact, regulators
in Canada were so appalled by radio preachers who broadcast attacks on other
religious viewpoints that they banned “single-faith” stations altogether (Brooks
2003). For its part, the FRC in 1931 revoked the radio license of Los Angeles
preacher Robert “Fighting Bob” Shuler, a fundamentalist who broadcast vit-
riolic attacks on city politicians, Jews, Catholics, and other evangelists. Shuler
sued the agency on First Amendment grounds, but the Supreme Court sided
with the FRC. “[If] one in possession of a permit to broadcast in interstate com-
merce,” the justices ruled, “may . . . offend the religious susceptibilities of thou-
sands, inspire political distrust and civic discord . . . then this great science [of
radio], instead of a boon, will become a scourge, and the nation a theater for the
display of individual passions and the collision of personal interests” (Trinity
United Methodist Church, South, v. Federal Radio Commission 1932). Thus, the
mainstream of evangelical broadcasters stuck to positively preaching their own

gospel rather than negatively attacking others (Ward 1994).
The advent of commercial radio networks in 1927 at first seemed a boon to
evangelical broadcasters: they needed only to purchase program time to gain
a national audience, without the expenses of operating their own stations. But
the “miracle” of radio also stirred fears that the medium could mesmerize the
masses. On-air fundraising was therefore controversial, so that NBC in 1928
and CBS in 1931 barred the sale of airtime for religious programs. Instead,
the two networks donated time for Protestant broadcasts to the theologically
liberal Federal Council of Churches (Hangen 2002; Ward 2013). Except
for the decade 1934–1944, when the upstart Mutual Broadcasting System
accepted paid-time religious programs, independent evangelical broadcasters
were shut out. Network bans on paid-time religious programs lasted through
the 1950s, by which time television was ascendant and radio was transition-
ing away from network programming and to the specialized niche formats
known today.
During World War II, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sus-
pended licensing of new radio stations. In a postwar rush to satisfy pent-up pub-
lic demand and license new outlets, the agency permitted commercial religious
stations as early as 1946 (Ward 1994). These stations could thus sell program
time to preachers, but their number grew by only about one per year through
the 1950s and only slightly more during the 1960s. During those two decades,
the best-known Christian anti-communist broadcasts were Carl McIntire’s
Twentieth Century Reformation Hour and Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade
(Hendershot 2011). Though McIntire at his height claimed a network of more
than six hundred stations and Hargis five hundred, most affiliates were locally
owned independent outlets in smaller media markets. They tended to lack in
signal strength and coverage, often did not broadcast after sunset, were not full-
time religious stations with loyal religious audiences, scheduled McIntire and
Hargis when they saw fit, and did not coordinate broadcast times with other
stations.
Also working against McIntire, Hargis, and other Christian anti-communist
broadcasters was the fairness doctrine, implemented in 1949 by the FCC. The
rule required stations to cover public issues, fairly represent opposing views, and
provide time for citizens to rebut any views presented on the air. After McIntire’s
organization purchased a radio station in 1965, he fought a running battle over
the fairness doctrine with the FCC and was ultimately shut down in 1973. For his
part, Hargis sparked a controversy that led to a landmark 1969 Supreme Court
ruling. When his program attacked a book that was critical of 1964 presidential
candidate Barry Goldwater, the author approached a local Pennsylvania station
that aired the program, requested airtime to rebut Hargis, and was refused. The
author sued station owner Red Lion Broadcasting and the high court unani-
mously upheld the fairness doctrine:
A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional

right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a radio
frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in
the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requir-
ing a licensee to share his frequency with others. . . . It is the right of
the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is
paramount. (Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications
Commission 1969)
With the rise of the New Christian Right in the 1970s, the number of reli-
gious radio stations tripled during the decade from less than three hundred
to more than a thousand (Ward 2013). Yet due to the Red Lion ruling, station
owners feared airing overtly politicized preaching. Repeal of the fairness doc-
trine became the top priority of the National Religious Broadcasters associa-
tion. After the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, the FCC in 1981 ditched the
“trusteeship model” of broadcasting and ruled that the market best determines
the public interest. By 1987 the agency rescinded the fairness doctrine. Thus,
while the ultraconservative “cold war broadcasters went off the air because of the
doctrine,” the current generation of conservative talkers “went on the air almost
immediately after Reagan suspended the doctrine” (Hendershot 2011, 25).
But while the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity is well known, the
story of evangelical talk radio is less familiar. The issue-oriented, live daily call-
in talk format came to Christian radio in 1983 when Marlin Maddoux’s two-
hour Point of View entered national syndication, enjoying a network of some
250 affiliates during the 1980s and 1990s. Still on the air, the program gave “a
conservative Christian perspective on issues and current events that affect the
family, schools, religious principles, and public policy . . . [with] guests that
include media experts, educators, politicians, and best-selling authors” (Melton,
Lucas, and Stone 1997, 213). At about the same time, Bob Larson became the
first evangelical “shock jock” when his daily two-hour Talk-Back with Bob Larson
debuted in 1982. With an “abrasive, controversial style” and syndication on up
to two hundred stations, Talk-Back “became famous for Larson’s riveting dia-
logues with rock stars, reformed sinners, and therapists, and for on-the-air exor-
cisms and healings” (192). Yet Point of View and Talk-Back were independently
produced and depended on syndication, which in the 1980s and early 1990s
meant purchasing time on independent stations one by one. As late as 1985, the
FCC limited the number of radio stations a broadcaster could own to fourteen
(seven in the AM band and seven in the FM). The cap was raised to twenty-four
(twelve in each band) in 1985; to thirty-six (eighteen in each band) in 1992,

when the FCC permitted broadcasters for the first time to own more than one
AM or FM station in the same market; and to forty (twenty in each band) in
1994 (Ward 2009).
Then Congress, in approving the Telecommunications Act of 1996, elimi-
nated the national cap on how many radio stations a broadcaster could own.
The impact was quickly felt. In 1996 alone, some 2,157 stations changed hands
(Fratrik 2002). By 1997, station ownership in 86 percent of the nation’s fifty
largest media markets was heavily or moderated concentrated, compared to
18 percent prior to the new law (Drushel 1998). Within six years, more than
40 percent of US radio stations were under new ownership (Sterling 2004), and
the total number of radio station owners fell 33 percent (Williams and Roberts
2002). By 2002, at least twenty-one radio groups owned more outlets than the
pre-1996 limit of 40 stations. These groups acquired more than 2,600 stations
and by 2002 owned about 1 out of every 5 radio stations in the nation (DiCola
and Thomson 2002).
Among the twenty-one largest radio groups in 2002 were evangelical broad-
casters Educational Media Foundation (EMF), American Family Association
(AFA), and Salem Communications (now Salem Media Group). Today EMF
operates two networks, K-LOVE and Air1, with a combined reach of more than
650 noncommercial FM stations and translators that broadcast contempo-
rary Christian music and selected teaching/preaching programs (Educational
Media Foundation 2018). AFA’s American Family Radio (2018) boasts nearly
200 “listener-supported” noncommercial FM stations that air news/talk and
preaching. For its part, Salem brought a new model to commercial Christian
radio by acquiring stations with strong signals in major cities, a strategy “oppo-
site of how most Christian broadcasters operate, where a common practice is
to acquire large numbers of low-power stations” (Abelman 2006, 215). In a few
years, Salem became the nation’s third-largest station owner in the top twenty-
five media markets (Wilhelm 2005) and today owns 115 stations, including
73 in the nation’s top twenty-five media markets and twenty-five in the top ten
(Salem Media Group 2018b). Once these Christian radio consolidators went to
work, by 2001 the number of network-owned religious stations in the fifty larg-
est markets significantly increased (Ward 2009). Big-name syndicated preachers
and Christian talk shows, which could afford network airtime, expanded their
reach at the expense of lesser-known syndicators (Ward 2012). Meanwhile,
Salem realized it could not only sell airtime at higher rates to syndicated preach-
ers and talkers but also produce its own talk shows and news service, distribute
them via satellite, and charge stations in smaller markets to air Salem news/talk.
The result is today’s evangelical radio marketplace in which Salem dominates
in major cities, Salem and USA Radio (founded by Maddoux in 1985) distribute
news/talk picked up by affiliates in smaller markets, and American Family Radio

blankets the hinterlands with noncommercial stations and low-power transla-
tors. All three further stream their content on demand via every digital media
platform (Ward 2018a). Thus, where McIntire and Hargis broadcast their brand
of Christian politics in a media universe of locally owned mom-and-pop stations
and the constraints of the fairness doctrine, today’s evangelical news/talk airs
over large networks, is heard nationwide at the same time each weekday by loyal
evangelical listeners, and is unfettered by any considerations of fairness.
Operationalizing a “Christian Worldview”

The main consideration of evangelical news/talk, which informs the news judg-
ments of evangelical broadcasters, is captured in the ubiquitous phrase “From
a Christian perspective.” The phrase operationalizes the concept of “Christian
worldview,” a concept first popularized among evangelicals in the 1970s to
bridge doctrinal differences between evangelical faith traditions and politi-
cally unite the movement under a shared banner with which to countervail the
“secular humanist” worldview (Hankins 2008; Worthen 2013). This notion of a
“Christian worldview,” however, is itself steeped in a curious history grounded in
the paradox between religious authority and secular rationality.
America’s First and Second Great Awakenings of the mid-eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries (Balmer 2010), together with the constitutional dis-
establishment of any state church, made evangelicalism the dominant force in
the new republic’s free religious marketplace (Finke and Starke 2005). Yet dises-
tablishment, by casting off the traditional support for public morality, sparked a
quest to find a new basis for virtuous self-government (Noll 1994). Evangelicals
of the nineteenth century found it in the Scottish Enlightenment, adapting the
philosophy of common-sense realism to maintain that biblical truths are self-
evident and all people are naturally endowed with sufficient reason to grasp
these truths through a plain reading of the scriptures. This common-sense rea-
soning was buttressed by taking the view, first popularized in the seventeenth
century by English natural philosopher Francis Bacon, that science consists of
observation and classification. Thus, the Bible was conceived as a storehouse of
facts that could be observed through reading the scriptures, so that classification
of these facts would scientifically reveal underlying patterns from which divine
laws could then be confidently derived (Marsden 1980). In this way, evangeli-
cals “bought into foundationalism whole hog,” but rather than “founding uni-
versal, indubitable truth on rationalism or empiricism, evangelicalism simply
argued that the right foundation for indubitable knowledge is the text of the
Bible and the Bible alone” (Smith 2011, 150–151). As a corollary, the doctrine
of “inerrancy” emerged by the late nineteenth century and holds that if God can-
not err, and if the Bible is God’s Word, then the Bible cannot err, where truth and
error are determined by a “correspondence theory” in which truth is understood
as that which corresponds to actual realities.
The paradox between authority and rationality in evangelical news/talk is
thus resolved by a strategically ambiguous “Christian worldview” that casts bib-
lical authority as a rational supposition derived by common-sense reasoning
from the scriptures. Seen in this light, the Bible becomes a rational framework
through which to interpret the news of the day—as suggested in the promotional
statements, shown in Table 2.1, of the major evangelical radio news services.
Similar themes of rational reasoning from sacred writ are representatively
sounded in the opening “bumpers,” shown in Table 2.2, of the weekday talk
shows aired over American Family Radio from midmorning through evening
drivetime.
Prominent in these examples of Christian radio news service promotions
(Table 2.1) and talk show openings (Table 2.2) are concepts that flow from a
“Christian worldview” including “biblical truth,” “Christian and traditional val-
ues,” “family focused,” “credible,” “Christian focus,” “Christian response,” “faith,
family, and freedom,” and “light.” At the same time, a dualism defines the puta-
tive Christian worldview of evangelical news/talk programming in opposition to
“the liberal bias that characterizes so much of the ‘mainstream’ media,” “the ivory
tower approach of the traditional networks,” “agenda-filled news reporting,” “the
bondage of the mainstream media,” and liberals who “know so much that isn’t
so” and place “restrictions on Christians,” even as they turn their backs on God
rather than honor him as the source of American liberty. The forces of “light”
and “freedom” are engaged in “battles for biblical truth,” on which “depend the
survival of Christian civilization,” against the forces of “darkness” and “the phi-
losophies of this world.” Believers must avoid “hypocrisy” by committing to be
“informed patriots” who “relentlessly explore the intersection of truth and poli-
tics,” the better to serve as “ambassadors” to a “dying culture.”
Genre as the Basis for Rhetorical Community

A useful framework for parsing this discourse is Miller’s (1994) theory of the
rhetorical community whose social actions are grounded in genres. The latter
function in the rhetorical community as a “bearer of culture . . . [that] literally
incorporates knowledge—knowledge of the aesthetics, economics, politics,
religious beliefs, and all the various dimensions of what we know as human cul-
ture” (69). As social action, a genre is “situated communication that is a capable
of reproduction, that can be manifested in more than one situation, more than
Table 2.1 Promotional Statements for Christian Radio News Services

American Family News Salem Radio Network News USA Radio News
[Y]‌our latest news The number one full- USA Radio Network
from a Christian service news source for is an American media
perspective . . . [w]hether today’s conservative and company, specializing in
it’s a story about prayer Christian radio . . . SRN long-form spoken word
in public schools, work- News breaks the ivory (talk radio) and radio
place restrictions on tower approach of the newscast production
Christians, or battles for traditional networks. . . . and distri-bution, with a
biblical truth within our [S]‌erving the Christian generally conservative and
denominations . . . from and traditional values Christian focus.3 . . . [The
reporters you can trust to community with full-time news] is balanced in a
give the latest news with- correspondents. . . . Family- world of agenda-filled
out the liberal bias that focused and credible– news reporting.4
characterizes so much of specifically created for
the “mainstream” media.1 Christian-formatted radio
stations.2
1
https://www.onenewsnow.com/general/about.
2
http://salemmedia.com/srn-pages/srn-news.
3
http://usaradio.com/about-2.
4
http://usaradio.com/affiliates/usa-radio-news.
one concrete space-time” (71). Genre supplies to members of a rhetorical com-

munity “reproducible speaker and addressee roles, social typifications of recur-
rent social needs or exigencies, topical structures (or ‘moves’ and ‘steps’), and
ways of indexing an event to material conditions, turning them into constraints
or resources” (71). As such, genre sustains the rhetorical community by both
reproducing it and reconciling its “centrifugal and centripetal forces” (74).
Further, Miller observed, genre functions as a “transmission belt” between indi-
vidual minds and the larger community so that, as in Giddens’s (1984) theory of
structuration, individual agency may create communal structures, but members
are simultaneously enabled and constrained as they act within and thus repro-
duce these structures.
Elsewhere, I have demonstrated how the evangelical social system reproduces
its rhetorical genres and speech codes across a macro level of evangelical institu-
tions and their mass-mediated representations (which disseminate communal
norms), a meso level of locally public sermonic rhetoric and congregational dis-
courses (which structure local joint deliberation and action), and a micro level
of spontaneous talk and private role enactments. These studies showed how pul-
pit rhetoric and church lingo (Ward 2010), charismatic leadership styles (Ward
Table 2.2 Opening Bumpers of American Family Radio Talk Shows

Program/Airtime* Program Opening
Today’s Issues1 Announcer: Welcome to Today’s Issues, offering a Christian

M–F 10–11:30 am response to the issues of the day.
Janet Mefferd Live2 Announcer: This is Janet Mefferd Live.
M–F 12–1 pm Anonymous Voice Clip: My conscience is captive to the Word
of God.
Janet Mefferd: Will America honor the God who gave us our
liberty and our rights? Or will we turn our backs on Him?
Winston Churchill Clip: Upon this battle depends the survival
of Christian civilization.
Mefferd: We have good news to share with a dying culture.
Let’s do it!
Anonymous Preacher Clip: We can take this country for Christ!
Announcer: And now, here’s your host, Janet Mefferd, on Amer-
ican Family Radio.
Focal Point3 Ronald Reagan Clip 1: Freedom prospers when religion is
M–F 1–3 pm vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.
Reagan Clip 2: An informed patriot is what we want.
Announcer: Welcome to American Family Radio’s Focal Point,
the home of muscular Christianity on conservative talk
radio, where we relentlessly explore the intersection of truth
and politics.
Reagan Clip 3: The trouble with our liberal friends is not
that they’re ignorant. It’s just that they know so much that
isn’t so.
Announcer: Now, here’s your host, Bryan Fischer.
Washington Watch4 Announcer: This is Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,
M–F 4–5 pm powered by the Family Research Council, your embassy of
faith, family, and freedom in the heart of our Nation’s Capital.
Now here’s your host, FRC President Tony Perkins.
(continued )
Table 2.2 Continued

Program/Airtime* Program Opening
The Hamilton Abraham Hamilton: Darkness is not an affirmative force. It
Corner5 simply reoccupies the space vacated by the light.
M–F 5–6 pm Announcer: This is The Hamilton Corner on American Family
Radio and Urban Family Talk [an AFR internet radio
station].
Hamilton: It should be uncomfortable for a believer to live as a
hypocrite.
Announcer: Delivering people out of the bondage of main-
stream media and the philosophies of this world.
Hamilton: God has called you and me to be His ambassadors,
even in this dark moment. Let’s not miss our moment.
Announcer: And now, The Hamilton Corner.
* All airtimes are United States Central Time Zone

1
https://afr.net/podcasts/todays-issues.
2
https://afr.net/podcasts/janet-mefferd-live.
3
https://afr.net/podcasts/focal-point.
4
http://www.frc.org/radio.
5
https://afr.net/podcasts/the-hamilton-corner.
2018b), and political preferences (Ward 2018c) are structurated across macro,
meso, and micro levels as media representations, Sunday sermons, and private
enactments reify one another.
Similarly, Bean (2014) found that “Christian radio” plays a decisive agenda-
setting role in American evangelical churches. In her view, her study affirmed
Katz and Lazarsfeld’s (1955) classic thesis that elites extend their influence by
reaching local opinion leaders who, in turn, translate elite messages into local
terms for local networks. Typical were a Baptist couple who “learned to connect
their religious and political identities from sources outside their local congrega-
tion” as they “became an avid listener to Christian radio” and would “rely on
Focus on the Family for information . . . [on] political advocacy” (Bean 2014,
135–136). The couple claimed to appreciate “balanced” news reporting but
were “not personally open to liberal arguments” and “interpreted the news as a
series of liberal assaults on truth and Christianity, following the narrative [they]
heard over and over on Fox News and Christian radio” (136). Because the
couple framed the news as a spiritual “battle between liberal and conservative
worldviews,” they “could only trust sources like [radio ministries] Focus on the
Family, the Family Research Council, or Concerned Women for America” (136–
137). The wife promoted her Christian worldview in the local congregation as
a youth group leader, while the husband was known among church members
for his involvement in a national “Presidential Prayer Team.” By contrast, Bean’s

companion study found that, in large measure because Canada has no electronic
church, members of Canadian evangelical churches shared the doctrines of their
American counterparts but did not incorporate a partisan political identity into
their religious identity. Thus, “American evangelicals are not bound to political
conservatism by the content of their distinctive theology or moral worldview”
(18), but because subcultural discourses have cast partisanship as a sacred activ-
ity and thereby delegitimized political diversity.
In terms of rhetorical community as theorized by Miller (1993, 1994), the
genre “Christian worldview” then functions as a bearer of culture that literally
incorporates all the dimensions of American evangelical knowledge: the com-
mitment to a “plain” common-sense reading of the scriptures, the “scientific”
rationality to derive divine laws by “reasoning” from the observed “facts” of
the biblical texts, the doctrine of “inerrancy” by which the word of a God who
cannot err necessarily corresponds to historic and scientific realities. Further,
the genre “Christian worldview” supplies the evangelical rhetorical commu-
nity with reproducible speaker and addressee roles (“credible” and “balanced”
Christian newscasters and talk show hosts help listeners become “informed
patriots” and “His ambassadors”), social typifications of recurrent social needs
or exigencies (“battles for biblical truth” must be waged against “the philoso-
phies of this world”), topical structures (the “darkness” of “liberal bias” and
“the ivory tower” must be opposed by the “light”), and ways of indexing an
event to material conditions (“restrictions on Christians” are accelerating in a
“dying culture”), turning them into constraints or resources (“we can take this
country for Christ” by “relentlessly exploring the intersection of truth and poli-
tics”). The ambiguity of the genre “Christian worldview” also creates a social
space where the centrifugal force of American evangelicals’ divergent doctrines
(whether or not charismatic gifts such as speaking in tongues and faith healing
operate in the church today) and the centripetal force of their shared bibliology
and soteriology (how to be “saved”) may be reconciled and the rhetorical com-
munity thus sustained.
A Day in the Life of “Christian Radio”

Finally, news/talk on evangelical radio illustrates how the genre “Christian
worldview” provides a basis for social action through “situated communica-
tion that is capable of reproduction, that can be manifested in more than one
situation, more than one concrete space-time” (Miller 1994, 71). The genre’s
broad reproducibility gives evangelical media presenters license in their news
judgments to “credibly” report news that may seem tenuously connected to
legitimate religious concerns and even “problematic . . . when, as is often the

case, religious radio talk show hosts address economic interests and thereby
align themselves with political views dominated by self-interested materialism”
(Sumser 2016, 107). Thus, opposition to abortion, marriage equality, and per-
missive sexual mores may be supported by direct citations from the Bible. But
where Christians might be expected to oppose violence and poverty, evangelical
news/talk programmers instead oppose gun control and federal welfare spend-
ing because the “Christian worldview” also encompasses claims that America is
a “Christian nation” (Connable 2016) whose liberties are ultimately secured by
a vigilant citizenry and whose prosperity owes to its self-reliant “Protestant work
ethic” (Martin 2016). The evangelical emphasis on individual religious experi-
ence, then, migrates naturally to individualistic stances toward the defense of
property rights and the pursuit of economic advancement.
To demonstrate how the genre “Christian worldview” enables and constrains
social action within the evangelical rhetorical community through “situated
communication that is capable of reproduction,” consider a “day in the life” of
the electronic church and its news/talk programming. Table 2.3 compares sto-
ries reported Monday, January 8, 2018, by the mainstream television network
evening newscasts and the major evangelical networks’ top-of-the-hour radio
news services.
The mainstream networks’ reportage for January 8, 2018, centered on several
major stories: speculation that Oprah Winfrey might run for president in 2020,
historic talks between North and South Korea, the Special Counsel investiga-
tion into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, severe winter
storms across the country, dangerous flooding and threatened mudslides in
California, the nationwide flu epidemic, and the fatal shooting of a Colorado law
officer. By contrast, and consistent with a “Christian worldview,” reportage from
the evangelical radio networks—distributed to a claimed total of 2,800 affiliates
combined—emanated from a rhetorical community where the main concerns
of the day were abortion, immigration, liberal educators, liberal media, big gov-
ernment, and gun rights and invasive technologies, and where president Donald
Trump, as the “anti-Obama” and “anti-Hillary,” symbolized conservative social
and economic values. A further hallmark of evangelical reportage was quoting
only friendly sources. In its January 8, 2018, lead story, for example, USA Radio
News (2018) reported:
[Miller:] “That the author is a garbage author of a garbage book.” A top

aide to President Trump speaks out about the book Fire and Fury which
questions President Trump’s mental abilities. White House Senior
Policy Advisor Stephen Miller telling CNN’s State of the Union: “The
president is a political genius who won against a field of 17 incredibly
Table 2.3 Stories Reported on Selected Newscasts for January 8, 2018
ABC World CBS Evening NBC Nightly American Salem Radio USA Radio
News Tonight1 News1 News1 Family News2 Network3 News4
Oprah 2020 Oprah 2020 Oprah 2020 Supreme Court leaves DACA at issue in talks Top aide calls Wolff
Killer of Colorado Fire and Fury book Initial talks about in place Mississippi over government book trash,
deputy sought JFK airport flooding Trump interview law on freedom of funding lauds Trump
Korea talks Korea talks with Mueller conscience Trump lauds tax Haley clarifies Trump
Flu season California flooding Smartphone use by Illinois school board reform at famers on North Korea
Mueller to request Trump Tower fire children member challenges convention Golden Globes talk of
Trump interview Romney treated for Video of Colorado liberal curriculum FCC chair cancels sexual harassment
Winter weather prostate cancer deputy shooting Christian legal group major speech at Trump to speak at
California flooding Flu season Winter weather sues over tax-funded Consumer Electron- Farm Bureau
Queen Elizabeth Korea talks abortions in Illinois ics Show due to Cold weather
reflects on her coro- 2018 Consumer Elec- Muslim congressman threats Nationwide health club
nation tronics Show backs domestic ter- Consumer borrowing pulls cable news
Internet scams ror group rise shows confi- from TVs in gyms
Professor’s final exam dence in economy SpaceX rocket launch
says Trump racist Parents group says net- Republicans discuss
Professor’s lecture says work execs like 2018 agenda
Zionists are terrorists “smutty television” GOP lawmaker says
rural Americans want
small government
Taxpayer group faults Gynecologist group CNN’s Tapper spars
remaining Obam- says women should on air with Trump
acare regulations be allowed to carry aide; Trump tweets
Islamic immigration to out own abortions NBC faces backlash for
Germany linked to Traditional depart- tweet calling Oprah
violent crime rise ment stores learning “future president”
Pro-life advocates fight to compete against Ron Paul on CNN says
uphill in California internet retailers Sessions won’t win
Investors urge Apple to on marijuana ban
fight iPhone addic- Interior Department
tion in children voids Obama ban
on oil drilling
Fall in gun background
checks means end of
“Obama gun boom”
1
Retrieved January 8, 2018, from Roku channels of ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News.
2
Accessed January 8, 2018. https://www.onenewsnow.com.
3
Accessed January 8, 2018. https://www.srnnews.com.
4
Accessed January 8, 2018. http://usaradio.com/usa-radio-news.
talented people, who took down the Bush dynasty, who took down the
Clinton dynasty, who took down the entire media complex.”
Salem Radio Network News (2018) that day followed a similar practice in the
lead story for the “Christian interest” portion of its newscast when the network
reported:
A leading decency advocate says the reason we have so much “smutty

television” is because the networks like it. “It’s not only these [inaudible]
producers go across America and do sampling to see what the nation
wants. They produce what they like. And what they like is what makes
them laugh or makes them entertained.” But Tim Winter of the Parents
Television Council said America clearly wants something else. “The
television series that continue on year after year, decade after decade,
and reruns are primarily shows that are actually family-friendly.” PTC
rates TV shows and movies at parentstv.org.
Of the three evangelical radio news services and their January 8, 2018, top-of-
the-hour newscasts, American Family News (AFN) Network (2018) made the
least pretense of journalistic balance, following its mandate (as shown in Table
2.1) to bring “your latest news from a Christian perspective . . . from reporters
you can trust to give the latest news without the liberal bias that characterizes
so much of the ‘mainstream’ media.” In reporting that the US Supreme Court
declined to hear a challenge to a Mississippi “freedom of conscience” law that,
among other things, permits businesses to deny services for gay weddings,
AFN quoted its own general counsel and a lawyer for the Alliance Defending
Freedom. In reporting that a local Illinois school board member questioned an
“anti-religious” curriculum on global citizenship, AFN quoted a spokesperson
for the Illinois Family Institute. In reporting that Congressman Keith Ellison, a
Muslim, had endorsed the book Antifa: An Anti-Fascist Handbook, AFN quoted
a spokesperson for the right-wing Young America’s Foundation. In two stories
reporting the “leftist” and “anti-Semitic” activities of two California university
professors, AFN respectively quoted spokespersons for the conservative stu-
dent group Campus Reform and the pro-Israel group Stand with Us. In a report
on Obamacare, AFR quoted a spokesperson for the conservative Texas Public
Policy Foundation. And in reporting a “pro-abortion” bill in the California
Senate, AFR quoted a spokesperson for Californians for Life. Excerpted quota-
tions from these and other January 8, 2018, stories reported by AFN are shown
in Table 2.4.
Evangelical radio for January 8, 2018, was also rife with talk shows, both net-
work produced and syndicated, that tackled current events “from a Christian
Table 2.4 Excerpts from American Family News Stories for January 8, 2018
Story Headline Spokesperson Quotation Excerpt
Quoted
SCOTUS: 5th Circuit Alliance “[T]‌here really is no constitutional

got it right on “religious Defending crisis when a state like Mississippi
freedom law” Freedom decides to protect the religious
convictions and moral convictions
of people who believe in marriage
between one man and one woman.”
School board mom Illinois Family “The central problem was theologi-
calls out controversial Institute cal errors taught to children as facts.”
assignment [She] tells OneNewsNow that “pro-
gressives” control many public schools
because Evangelicals are reluctant to
take action, leaving the schools and
classrooms in control of liberals who
are passionate about their beliefs.
Left leader promoting Young America’s “This book that he [Rep. Keith Elli-
irresponsible, foolhardy Foundation son] posed with [in a photo posted to
ideals his Twitter account] emphasizes sup-
pressing the First Amendment rights
of those you disagree with, empha-
sizes the use of violence to obtain an
ends to their means, and it really is
concerning that someone who is mov-
ing up on the left in America would
think that those sorts of tactics are
acceptable to promote.”
College course final Campus Reform According to the conservative col-
depicts Trump as hater, lege publication Campus Reform, little
Hillary as unifier effort was made by the course’s pro-
fessor . . . to hide her leftist leaning.
USC OK with Stand with Us “A professor can say a lot of things,
prof ’s anti-Semitic including this, but [whether profes-
presentation? sors] should be held responsible for
what they say is the question. And we
feel he should be.”
(continued )
Table 2.4 Continued

Story Headline Spokesperson Quotation Excerpt
Quoted
Revise insurance rules Texas Public Pol- “[I]‌nstead of repealing those [regu-
and watch premiums icy Foundation lations], they’re reaching into our
“skyrocket” wallets, taking our tax dollars, and
then handing them to big insurance
companies to continue propping up
Obama-care.”
Rubin: It’s a terrible Former mayor of “In the Islamic world, women
situation in Europe Israeli city are . . . sexually abused, physically
abused, and emotionally abused, so it
shouldn’t come as a surprise that you
suddenly let these young single males
out of a box and think they’re not
going to go into a country like Ger-
many, where it’s a very liberal society,
and they’re not going to go crazy. This
is part of their culture, that women are
their play things.”
Voice for life “very much Californians for “The voice for life is in a very much
a minority” in California Life minority, and so while we will
reemphasize that fact—that the
chemical abortion pill ends a human
life—we will also talk about the
horrific, traumatic impact that the
chemical abortion experience has on
women.”
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perspective.” Table 2.5 summarizes what listeners may have heard that day over
the airwaves or on demand via streaming media.
Crossovers Between Christian and

Conservative Media
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era has spawned a growing confluence of interests between the electronic
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with Sophia “the youngest of the aeons” within the Pleroma
and cannot again issue forth.
376. Hippolytus, op. cit. c. 32: ἔδοξεν αὐτοῖς μὴ μόνον κατὰ

συζυγίαν δεδοξακέναι τὸν υἵον, δοξάσαι [δὲ] καὶ διὰ
προσφορᾶς καρπῶν πρεπόντων τῷ Πατρί. “It seemed good
to them [the aeons of the Pleroma] not only to magnify the
Son by conjunction, but also by an offering of pleasing fruits to
the Father.” So in the mysteries of Isis, Osiris is called the fruit
of the vine Dionysos. See Athenagoras, Legatid. c. XXII.
Plainly Bythos and Nous or Monogenes are here represented
as Father and Son as in the Ophite myth. The new projection
is necessary to accord with the text about the whole Pleroma
dwelling together bodily in Jesus. Cf. Colossians i. 19.
377. The expression ὁ ἀρχιερεὺς ὁ μέγας is repeated by Clement

of Alexandria, Protrept. c. XII., possibly with reference to this
passage. It may be noticed, however, that Jesus is here also
made the Messenger or Ambassador of the Light as with the
Ophites. It will be seen later that he occupies the same place
with the Manichaeans. Cf. Chapter XIII, infra.
378. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 32, p. 289, Cruice.
379. Ibid. p. 290, Cruice. Κατὰ τοῦτο τοίνυν τὸ μέρος, θνητή τις
ἐστὶν ἡ ψυχή, μεσότης τις οὖσα· ἔστι γὰρ Ἑβδομὰς καὶ
Κατάπαυσις. “According to this, therefore,” [he has just said
that fire has a twofold power, for there is a fire which devours
everything and which cannot be extinguished] “part (of the
Demiurge) is a certain soul which is subject to death, and a
certain substance which occupies a middle place. For it is a
Hebdomad and a laying to rest.” The passage is not easy, but
seems to mean that some of the souls made by the Demiurge
are mortal, while others are susceptible of salvation. Cf. n. 1,
p. 109, infra. The name Hebdomad evidently refers to the
seven astronomical heavens under the rule of the Demiurge,
and the title “Ancient of Days” identifies him, like the
Jaldabaoth of the Ophites, with the God of the Jews.
380. Called Ogdoadas or eighth, because it is next above the
seven heavens; but Sophia, the 28th, was the last of the
aeons. We see, therefore, that Valentinus, like the Ophites of
the diagram, is reckoning forwards and backwards in the most
confusing way.
381. So Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, § 9, pp. 44, 45, Harvey, says that they

[the Valentinians] say that the seven heavens are endowed
with intelligence (νοητούς) and that they suppose them to be
angels, and that the Demiurge is himself an angel like God.
Also that Paradise is a heaven above the third, and that a
fourth angel rules (?) there, and that from him Adam took
somewhat while talking to him. Whatever this story may
mean, it is curious to see how readily the Gnostics identified
in name a heavenly place with its ruler, as in the titles of kings
and peers.
382. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, § 10, pp. 47, 48, Harvey, says that the
Devil or Cosmocrator and all the spiritual things of evil (τὰ
πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας) were made out of the pain (λύπη)
of Sophia, and that he is the creation of the Demiurge, but
knows what is above him, because he is a spirit, while his
creator is ignorant that there is anything higher than himself,
because he is only ruler of animal things (ψυχικὰ ὑπάρχοντα).
In this, which is probably the teaching of Ptolemy, Valentinus’
successor is seen to be reverting to the Ophite ideas.
Hippolytus, who here probably gives us Valentinus’ own
doctrine, says on the other hand (op. cit. Bk VI. c. 33, pp. 290,
291, Cruice): Ὥσπερ οὖν τῆς ψυχικῆς οὐσίας ἡ πρώτη καὶ
μεγίστη δύναμις γέγονεν εἰκὼν [the text is here restored by
Cruice: τοῦ μονογενοῦς υἱοῦ, οὕτω τῆς ὑλικῆς οὐσίας δύναμις]
διάβολος, ὁ ἄρχων τοῦ κόσμον τούτου· τῆς δὲ τῶν δαιμόνων
οὐσίας, ἤτις ἐστὶν ἐκ τῆς ἀπορίας, ὁ Βεελζεβούδ. “As therefore
the first and greatest power of the animal substance (the
Demiurge) came into being as the image of the unique son
(Nous), so the power of the material substance is the Devil,
the Ruler of this world: and Beelzebud [the power] of the
substance of demons which came into being from the
perplexity” (of Sophia). It has been shown elsewhere
(P.S.B.A. 1901, pp. 48, 49) that this Beelzebud or Beelzebuth
is written in the Magic Papyri Jabezebuth or Yahweh Sabaoth,
probably in pursuance of the parallelism which gives every
god or superior power his correspondent personality in the
inferior or evil world. In all magic, mediaeval or otherwise,
Beelzebuth is carefully distinguished from Satan.
383. Matthew x. 25, xii. 24, 27; Mark iii. 22; Luke xi. 15, have
βεελξεβούλ, while the Peshitto writes the more familiar
Beelzebub. See P.S.B.A. quoted in last note.
384. Called also the Heavenly Jerusalem. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI.
c. 32, p. 290, Cruice.
385. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, § 10, p. 49, Harvey: Δημιουργήσαντα δὴ

τὸν κόσμον, πεποιηκέναι καὶ τὸν ἄνθρωπον τὸν χοϊκόν· οὐκ
ἀπὸ ταύτης δὲ τῆς ξηρᾶς γῆς, ἀλλ’ ἀπὸ τῆς ἀοράτου οὐσίας,
ἀπὸ τοῦ κεχυμένου καὶ ῥευστοῦ τῆς ὕλης λαβόντα· καὶ εἰς
τοῦτον ἐμφυσῆσαι τὸν ψυχικὸν διορίζονται. “Having indeed
fashioned the world, he (the Demiurge) made material man;
not taking him out of this dry earth, but from the unseen
substance, from the poured forth and liquid matter, and into
him, they declare, he breathed that which is of the soul.”
Although this might be taken for a Ptolemaic elaboration or
embroidery of Valentinus’ own doctrine, it is repeated in
almost identical words in the Excerpta Theodoti of Clement of
Alexandria, which represent the teaching of the Oriental
School, and it is therefore possibly the statement of
Valentinus himself. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 34, p. 293,
Cruice, is quite in accord with this. Irenaeus says later (Bk I. c.
1, § 11) with reference to the body of Jesus: καὶ ὑλικὸν δὲ οὐδ’
ὁτιοῦν εἰληφέναι λέγουσιν αὐτόν· μὴ γὰρ εἶναι τὴν ὕλην
δεκτικὴν σωτηρίας. “And they say that He took on Himself
nothing whatever of matter; for matter is not susceptible of
salvation.” From which it is to be inferred that Valentinus
rejected the resurrection of the body.
386. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, § 4, p. 23, Harvey, says that when Jesus,

the Joint Fruit of the Pleroma, was projected, Angels of the
same kind as himself (ὁμογενεῖς) were projected with him as a
guard of honour. That these are the spiritual spouses of the
souls of men is confirmed by Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 34,
p. 292, according to Cruice’s emendation: Ὑποδιῄρηται δὲ καὶ
τὰ ἐν τῇ Ὀγδοάδι, καὶ προβεβήκασιν ἡ Σοφία, ἥτις ἐστὶ μήτηρ
πάντων τῶν ζώντων κατ’ αὐτούς, καὶ ὁ κοινὸς τοῦ
Πληρώματος καρπὸς ὁ Λόγος, [καὶ] οἵτινες εἰσὶν ἄγγελοι
ἐπουράνιοι, πολιτευόμενοι ἐν Ἰερουσαλὴμ τῇ ἄνω, τῇ ἐν
οὐρανοῖς. “The things which are in the Ogdoad also are
subdivided, and there proceed (from it) Sophia who is,
according to them, the Mother of All Living, and the Joint Fruit
of the Pleroma, the Logos, and there are certain heavenly
angels who are citizens of the Jerusalem which is above, that
which is in the heavens.” So later (ibid. p. 293, Cruice) ...
οἵτινές εἰσι λόγοι ἄνωθεν κατεσπαρμένοι ἀπὸ τοῦ κοινοῦ τοῦ
Πληρώματος καρποῦ καὶ τῆς Σοφίας εἰς τοῦτον τὸν κόσμον,
κατοικοῦντες ἐν [σώμα]τι χοϊκῷ μετὰ ψυχῆς, ὅταν δαίμονες μὴ
συνοικῶσι τῇ ψύχῃ. “There are certain Logoi sown from above
in the world by the Joint Fruit of the Pleroma and Sophia,
which dwell in the material body with the soul, when there are
no demons dwelling with it.” Clement of Alexandria, in Strom.
Bk V. c. 14, points out that the notion of demons dwelling with
the soul is to be found in Plato, and quotes the passage from
the Vision of Er (Rep. Bk X. c. 15) about the souls of men
between births each receiving from the hand of Lachesis a
demon as their guides through life. It is more likely, however,
to have been derived from the Zoroastrian belief in the
Fravashis or Ferouers, celestial spirits who live with Ahura
Mazda and the powers of light, until they are sent on earth to
be joined with the souls of men, and to combat the powers of
Ahriman (see L. C. Casartelli, La Philosophie Religieuse du
Mazdéisme, Paris, 1884, pp. 76-80, for references). Cf. Hope
Moulton, op. cit. c. VIII. passim.
387. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, § 12, p. 59, Harvey: Τοὺς δὲ πνευματικοὺς

ἀποδυσαμένους τὰς ψυχὰς καὶ πνεύματα νοερὰ γενομένους,
ἀκρατήτως καὶ ἀοράτως ἐντὸς πληρώματος εἰσελθόντας
νύμφας ἀποδοθήσεσθαι τοῖς περὶ τὸν Σωτῆρα ἀγγέλοις. “And
the Spirituals, or Pneumatis, doffing their souls and becoming
intelligent spirits, shall enter unperceived and unseen within
the Pleroma, and shall be given as brides to the angels about
the Saviour.” This suggestion, which completely shocked the
modesty of Tertullian, may be connected with the Zoroastrian
idea of the virgin who appears to the believer as his conductor
at the bridge Chinvat. See Chapter XII, infra.
388. This appears in the Excerpta Theodoti, fr. 63, Migne’s Patrol.
Graeci, t. IX. col. 689: Ἡ μὲν οὖν πνευματικῶν ἀνάπαυσις ἐν
Κυριακῇ ἐν Ὀγδοάδι ἡ Κυριακὴ ὀνομάζεται· παρὰ τῇ μητρὶ
ἔχοντα τὰς ψυχὰς τὰ ἐνδύματα ἄχρι συντελείας· αἱ δὲ ἄλλαι
πισταὶ ψυχαὶ παρὰ τῷ Δημιονυργῷ· περὶ δὲ τὴν συντέλειαν
ἀναχώρουσι καὶ αὐτοὶ εἰς Ὀγδοάδας. Εἶτα τὸ δεῖπνον τὸν
γάμον κοινὸν πάντων τῶν σωζωθέντων, ἄχρις ἂν ἀπισωθῇ
πάντα καὶ ἄλληλα γνωρίσῃ. “Therefore the repose of the
Spirituals in [the dwelling] of the Lord, that is, in the Ogdoad,
is called the Lord’s rest” (cf. Irenaeus, Bk I. cc. 1, 9, p. 46,
Harvey): “the garments [i.e. natures] containing the souls [will
remain] with the Mother until the Consummation. And the
other faithful souls (will remain) with the Demiurge; and at the
Consummation they will withdraw, and they also will go into
the Ogdoad. Then will be the Wedding Feast of all those who
are saved until all things shall be made equal and all things
mutually made known.” This heavenly banquet, of which we
may be quite sure Valentinus made the Marriage in Cana a
type, will be met with again in the worship of Mithras (Chapter
XII, infra). But it was also well known to the Orphics (see
Abel’s Orphica, Frag. 227, etc.), and the question repeats
itself: Did the Orphics borrow the idea from the Persians, or
the Mithraists from the Orphics?
389. Valentinus may have found this doctrine in Egypt, where as

Maspero points out (Ét. Égyptol. I. p. 398) only the rich and
noble were thought to enjoy the life beyond the grave.
390. Valentinus’ remark about the Cosmocrator being superior in

knowledge to the Demiurge because he is a spirit (see n. 1, p.
108 supra) much complicates the problem, and brings us
pretty near to the Dualism of the Avesta. That all matter was
in Valentinus’ opinion transitory appears from Irenaeus, Bk I.
c. 1, § 13, where it is said that when all the seed scattered by
Sophia in the world, i.e. the souls of the Pneumatici, is
gathered in, the fire which is within the Cosmos shall blaze
forth and after destroying all matter shall be extinguished with
it.
391. Clem. Alex., Strom. Bk II. c. 8, quotes an epistle of Valentinus

in which he speaks of the terror of the angels at the sight of
man because of the things which he spoke: διὰ τὸν ἀοράτως
ἐν αὐτῷ σπέρμα δεδωκότα τῆς ἄνωθεν οὐσίας, καὶ
παρρησιαζόμενον “because of that within him which yielded a
germ of the substance on high, and spoke freely.” So
Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, § 10, p. 51, Harvey: Ἔλαθεν οὖν, ὡς
φασί, τὸν Δημιουργὸν ὁ συγκατασπαρεὶς τῷ ἐμφυσήματι
αὐτοῦ ὑπὸ τῆς Σοφίας πνευματικὸς ἀνθρώπων [ἄνθρωπος]
ἀρρήτῳ [adj. δυνάμει καὶ] προνοίᾳ. “It escaped the Demiurge,
therefore, as they say, that the man whom he had formed by
his breath was at the same time made spiritual by Sophia with
unspeakable power and foresight.” So that, as Irenaeus says
a few lines later, man has his soul from the Demiurge, his
body from Chaos, his fleshly part (τὸ σαρκικὸν) from matter,
and his spiritual man from the Mother, Achamoth [i.e. ‫חכמת‬
“Wisdom”].
392. Clem. Alex. Strom. Bk IV. c. 13, quoting “a certain homily” (τις
ὁμιλία) of Valentinus: Ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς ἀθανατοί ἐστε, καὶ τέκνα ζωῆς
ἐστε αἰωνίας καὶ τὸν θάνατον ἠθέλετε μερίσασθαι εἰς ἑαυτούς,
ἵνα δαπανήσητε αὐτὸν καὶ ἀναλώσητε καὶ ἀποθάνῃ ὁ θάνατος
ἐν ὑμῖν καὶ δι’ ὑμῶν. Ὅταν γὰρ τὸν μὲν κόσμον λύητε, ὑμεῖς δὲ
καταλύησθε, κυριεύετε τῆς κτίσεως καὶ τῆς φθορᾶς ἁπάσης.
“You were deathless from the beginning and the children of
life everlasting, and you wish to share out death among you,
in order that you may dissipate and destroy it and that death
may die in and by you; for when you put an end to the world
and are yourselves put an end to, you have rule over creation
and all corruption.” So one of the documents of the Pistis
Sophia speaks of this world being finally consumed by the fire
“which the perfect wield.” It was doubtless such predictions
which gave colour to the charge of incendiarism made by the
Roman authorities against the Christians generally. For the
translation of the pneumatics to the Ogdoad see next note.
393. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 31, p. 290, Cruice: Ἐὰν ἐξομοιωθῇ
τοῖς ἄνω ἐν Ὀγδοάδι, ἀθάνατος ἐγένετο καὶ ἦλθεν εἰς τὴν
Ὀγδοάδα ἥτις ἐστί, φησίν, Ἰερουσαλὴμ ἐπουράνιος· ἐὰν δὲ
ἐξομοιωθῇ τῇ ὕλῃ, τουτέστι τοῖς πάθεσι τοῖς ὑλικοῖς, φθαρτή
ἐστι καὶ ἀπώλετο. “If [the soul] be of the likeness of those on
high in the Ogdoad, it is born deathless and goes to the
Ogdoad which is, he says, the heavenly Jerusalem; but if it be
of the likeness of matter, that is, if it belongs to the material
passions, it is corruptible and is utterly destroyed.”
394. ψυχικὸς ἄνθρωπος translated in the A.V. by “natural man”

evidently means in the Valentinian sense those who are
animated or have had breathed into them the breath of life
merely. It has nothing to do with soul as we understand the
term.
395. Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. p. 225.
396. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 36, pp. 297, 298, Cruice: Ἔδει οὖν
διορθωμένων τῶν ἄνω κατὰ τὴν αὐτὴν ἀκολουθίαν καὶ τὰ
ἐνθάδε τυχεῖν διωρθώσεως. “Wherefore when things on high
had been put straight, it had to be according to the law of
sequences that those here below should be put straight also.”
397. Hippolytus, op. cit. p. 297, Cruice: ἐδιδάχθη γὰρ ὑπὸ τῆς
Σοφίας ὁ Δημιουργός, ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν αὐτὸς Θεὸς μόνος ὡς
ἐνόμιζε, καὶ πλὴν αὐτοῦ ἕτερος (οὐκ) ἔστιν· ἀλλ’ ἔγνω
διδαχθεὶς ὑπὸ τῆς Σοφίας τὸν κρείττονα· κατηχήθη γὰρ ὑπ’
αὐτῆς, καὶ ἐμυήθη καὶ ἐδιδάχθη τὸ μέγα τοῦ Πατρὸς καὶ τῶν
Αἰώνων μυστήριον, καὶ ἐξεῖπεν αὐτὸ οὐδενί, κ.τ.λ. “For the
Demiurge had been taught by Sophia that he was not the only
God and that beside him there was none other, as he had
thought; but through Sophia’s teaching he knew better. For he
had been instructed and initiated by Sophia, and had been
taught the great mystery of the Father and of the Aeons, and
had declared it to none”—in support of which the statement in
Exodus (vi. 2, 3) about being the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, but “by my name Jehovah was I not known unto them”
is quoted. The identification by Valentinus of the Demiurge
with the God of the Jews is therefore complete.
398. σφάλματα “stumblings,” Hippolytus, loc. cit.
399. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk vi. c. 35, p. 295, Cruice. I have taken
what seems on comparison to be the original form of
Valentinus’ teaching. In the same chapter, Hippolytus tells us
that his followers were divided on the question of the
composition of the body of Jesus—the Italic School led by
Heracleon and Ptolemy averring that it was psychic and that
at His baptism only the πνεῦμα came upon Him as a dove,
while the Oriental School of Axionicus and Bardesanes
maintained that it was pneumatic from the first. Cf. n. 2, p. 116
infra.
400. Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. p. 226. The Excerpta Theodoti, on

which he relies, says (fr. 78): Μέχρι τοῦ βαπτίσματος οὖν ἡ
εἱμαρμένη, φασίν, ἀληθής· μετὰ δὲ τοῦτο οὐκ ἔτι ἀληθεύουσιν
οἱ ἀστρολόγοι. Ἔστι δὲ οὐ τὸ λουτρὸν μόνον τὸ ἐλευθεροῦν,
ἀλλὰ καὶ ἡ γνῶσις τίνες ἦμεν, τί γεγόναμεν, ποῦ ἦμεν, ἢ ποῦ
ἐνεβλήθημεν, ποῦ σπεύδομεν, πόθεν λυτρούμεθα, τί γέννησις
τί ἀναγέννησις. “Until baptism then, they say the destiny [he is
talking of that which is foretold by the stars] holds good; but
thereafter the astrologers’ predictions are no longer unerring.
For the [baptismal] font not only sets us free, but is also the
Gnosis which teaches us what we are, why we have come
into being, where we are, or whither we have been cast up,
whither we are hastening, from what we have been
redeemed, why there is birth, and why re-birth.” For baptism
was to the Valentinian initiation, and a mystagogue of Eleusis
would have expressed himself no differently.
401. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, § 13, pp. 60-62, Harvey; Amélineau,

Gnost. Ég. p. 226, and Excerpta Theodoti there quoted.
402. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 35, pp. 295, 296, Cruice: Ὁ δὲ
Ἰησοῦς, ὁ καινὸς ἄνθρωπος, ἀπὸ Πνεύματος Ἁγίου [καὶ τοῦ
Ὑψίστου], τουτέστι τῆς Σοφίας καὶ τοῦ Δημιουργοῦ, ἵνα τὴν
μὲν πλάσιν καὶ κατασκευὴν τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ ὁ Δημιουργὸς
καταρτίσῃ, τὴν δὲ οὐσίαν αὐτοῦ τὸ Πνεῦμα παράσχῃ τὸ Ἅγιον,
καὶ γένηται Λόγος ἐπουράνιος ἀπὸ τῆς Ὀγδοάδος γεννηθεὶς
διὰ Μαρίας. “But Jesus, the new man, [has come into being]
by the Holy Spirit and by the Highest, that is by Sophia and
the Demiurge, so that the Demiurge might put together the
mould and constitution of His body and that the Holy Spirit
might provide its substance; and that He might become the
Heavenly Logos ... when born of Mary.” According to this, the
body of Jesus was a “psychic” or animal one; yet Hippolytus
says immediately afterwards (p. 296, Cruice), that it was on
this that there was a division between the Italic and the
Oriental Schools of Valentinians, the former with Heracleon
and Ptolemy saying that the body of Jesus was an animal
one, the Holy Spirit coming on Him as a dove at His baptism,
while the Orientals with Axionicus and Bardesanes
maintained that the body of the Saviour was pneumatic or
spiritual, “the Holy Spirit or Sophia and the power of the
Highest or Demiurgic art having come upon Mary, in order
that what was given to Mary might be put into form.”
Apparently Valentinus was willing to call the God of the Jews
Ὕψιστος or “Highest,” which M. Cumont thinks was his name
in Asia Minor.
403. With the exception of that of St John, since the part of the
Pistis Sophia which it is suggested is by Valentinus does not
quote it. His followers, however, knew of it, as in the Excerpta
Theodoti the opening verse τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος καὶ ὁ
Λόγος ἦν παρὰ τὸν Θεὸν, καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος is quoted with
the comments of οἱ ἀπὸ τοῦ Οὐαλεντίνου on it. Cf. Amélineau,
Gnost. Ég. p. 209, where the passage is given in n. 4.
404. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, § 13, pp. 60-62, Harvey: Εἰσὶ δὲ οἱ

λέγοντες... Ἔπαθε δὲ λοιπὸν κατ’ αὐτοὺς ὁ ψυχικὸς Χριστός,
καὶ ὁ ἐκ τῆς οἰκονομίας κατεσκευασμένος μυστηριωδῶς, ἵν’
ἐπιδείξῃ [δι’] αὐτοῦ ἡ μήτηρ τοῦ ἄνω Χριστοῦ, ἐκείνου τοῦ
ἐπεκταθέντος τῷ Σταυρῷ, καὶ μορφώσαντος τὴν Ἀχαμὼθ
μόρφωσιν τὴν κατ’ οὐσίαν· πάντα γὰρ ταῦτα τύπους ἐκείνων
εἶναι λέγουσι. “And there are some” (probably the Anatolic or
Oriental School is meant) “who say.... And further the animal
Christ, He who had been mysteriously formed by
dispensation, suffered so that the Mother might show forth
through Him the type of the Christ on high, of him who is
extended by Stauros, and gave shape to Achamoth as
regards substance: for they say that all things here are the
types of others there.”
405. Tertullian, adv. Valentinianos, c. IV.
406. That is, not a martyr, but one who had suffered for the faith
without losing his life.
407. Irenaeus, Bk III. c. 4, § 1, vol. II. p. 17, Harvey; Eusebius, Hist.

Eccl. Bk IV. c. 11. Cf. Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. p. 170.
408. Tertullian, de Praescpt. c. XXX. Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. p. 175,

objects to this.
409. Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. p. 172, n. 1; ibid. p. 175.
410. Epiphanius, Pan., Haer. XXXI. c. 2.
412. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, § 2, p. 13, Harvey.
413. See n. 2, p. 116 supra.
414. Irenaeus, Prooem. p. 4, Harvey.
415. Clem. Alex. Strom. Bk IV. c. 9.
416. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 38, p. 302, Cruice. So Irenaeus,

Bk I. c. 5, § 2, p. 101, Harvey. This appears to be hyperbole
rather than dualism.
417. Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. p. 189.
419. Albîrûnî, Chronology of Ancient Nations, ed. Sachau, 1879,

pp. 27, 189.
420. De Faye, Intro. etc. p. 105, n. 1; Tertullian, de Carne Christi, c.

XVI.
421. See Hort, Bardaisan, in Dict. Christian Biog.
422. Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. Bk IV. c. 30, says that Bar Daisan was
first a Valentinian and afterwards recanted, “but did not
entirely wipe away the filth of his old heresy.”
423. Rather a suspect name for a hymn writer.
424. Ephrem Syrus’ own date is given as 370 A.D., in Dict. Christian
Biog. s.h.n.
425. See n. 3, p. 117 supra.
426. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 5, § 1, p. 98, Harvey.
427. See n. 2, p. 118 supra.
428. This may have been due either to their Egyptian extraction, or
to the necessity of putting the matter in a way that would be
intelligible to their Egyptian disciples. Cf. Naville, Old Egyptian
Faith, 1909, where he says that the Egyptian way of
expressing abstract ideas is by metaphors. Their ancestors,
the Egyptians of the early Dynasties, when they wanted to
describe how gods of both sexes came forth from one single
male deity, did so by means of a very coarse image. See
Budge, Papyrus of Nesi-Amsu, Archaeologia, vol. LII. (1890),
pp. 440, 441. Cf. same author, Hieratic Papyri in B.M.
429. Courdaveaux, R.H.R. Jan.-Fev. 1892, p. 293 and n. 7. Mgr

Duchesne, op. cit. pp. 244, 245, agrees that Clement looked
upon the Son as a creature only. Nor does there seem much
difference between Valentinus’ view of the relation between
the Demiurge and the Unknown Father, and Clement’s
remarks about the Son whom he calls timeless and
unbegotten and says that it is from Him that we must learn the
“remote cause the Father of the Universe”: Strom. Bk VII. c. 1.
Cf. Justin Martyr, c. Trypho. c. 56.
430. R.H.R. Jan.-Fev. 1891, p. 27. Tertullian’s own heresy was of

course Montanism. Harnack, Hist. of Dogma, Eng. ed., II. pp.
257, 258, says indeed that Hippolytus’ own views of the Trinity
coincide with those of Valentinus and are a relic of polytheism.
431. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 29, pp. 280, 281, Cruice.
432. 2 John iv. 16. So Ἀγάπη “Love” is made the summit of the
universe in the Ophite Diagram. See Chap. VIII supra.
433. Neander, Ch. Hist. vol. II. p. 90.

434. Heracleon, quoted by Origen in Commentaries on St John, Bk
X. c. 19.
435. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 36, pp. 297, 298, Cruice.
436. Ibid. loc. cit. p. 298, Cruice.
437. Clem. Alex. Strom. Bk II. c. 20.
438. Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. p. 230; Neander, Ch. Hist. vol. II. p. 94.
439. Neander, op. et loc. cit. p. 150 and note, says Clement of
Alexandria declares that while Marcion wished to found a
Church, the other Gnostics endeavoured to found schools
(διατριβαί) only. Clem. Alex. Strom. Bk VII. c. 15, seems to be
the passage referred to; but in the present state of the text it
may be doubted whether it will bear the construction Neander
puts upon it.
440. Irenaeus, Bk I. Prooem. p. 4, Harvey.
441. Cf. Renan, L’Église Chrétienne, p. 165. The manner in which

the Valentinians tried to make converts to their doctrines
within the Church is described by Irenaeus, Bk III. c. 15, § 2,
pp. 78, 80, Harvey, and Tertullian, adv. Valentinianos, c. 1.
442. Renan, L’Église Chrétienne, pp. 152, 153, for references.
443. Tertullian, de Pudicitia, and Pseudo Cyprian, de Glor. Martyr.

passim.
444. See Chap. VII, n. 1, p. 8 supra.
445. Tertullian, Scorpiace, c. 1.
446. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Bury’s ed. vol. II. p. 13. Cf. what
Irenaeus, Βk I. c. 1, § 8, p. 36, Harvey, says as to the high
price charged by the Valentinians for their teaching.
447. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk IV. c. 4, §§ 1-15.
448. Irenaeus, Bk I. cc. 7-8 passim, pp. 114-156, Harvey.
449. Thus he says that the Dove signifies Alpha and Omega, the
first and the last, because Α and Ω, like περιστερά “dove,”
have the numerical value of 801.
450. A similar miracle is performed by the risen Jesus in the Bruce

Papyrus. See Chap. X infra.
451. Verse:
a.
Φῶς πατρικὸν ποθέουσα, σύναιμε, σύνευνε, σοφή

μου,
λούτροις χρεισαμένη Χ(ρειστο)ῦ μύρον ἄφθιτον, ἁγνὸν,
Αἰώνων ἔσπευσας ἀθρ[ῆ]σαι θεῖα πρόσωπα,
βουλῆς τῆς μεγάλης μέγαν ἄγγελον, υἱὸν ἀληθῆ,
[εἰς ν]υμφῶνα μολοῦσα καὶ εἰς [κόλπ]ους ἀνόρουσα[?]
[Αἰώνων πα]τρικοὺς κ[αὶ]....
b.
Οὐκ ἔσχεν κοινὸν βιότου [τ]έλος ἥδε θανοῦσα·

κάτθανε καὶ ζώει καὶ ὁρᾷ φάος ἄφθιτον ὄντως·
ζώει μὲν ζωοῖσι, θανὲν δὲ θανοῦσιν ἀληθῶς.
γαῖα, τί θαυμάζεις νέκυος γένος; ὴ πεφόβηται;
(Boeckh’s) C. I. G. 9595a, t. I. and p. 594.
“Longing for the light of the Father, partner of my blood,

partner of my bed, O my wise one!
Anointed at the font with the incorruptible and pure
myrrh of Christ,
Thou hast hastened to behold the divine faces of the
Aeons, [and]
The Great Angel of the Great Council, the true Son.
Thou hast gone to the nuptial couch and hast hurried
to the fatherly bosoms of the Aeons
And....
Though dying, she has not suffered the common end of
life,
She is dead, and yet lives and actually beholds the
light incorruptible,
To the living she is alive, and dead only to those really
dead.
O Earth, why dost thou wonder at this new kind of
shade? or dost thou fear it?”
This was engraved on a cippus of white marble found about

three miles from Rome in the Via Latina and is now in the
Kircher Museum. Renan’s translation is given in Marc Aurèle,
p. 147. That the lady’s name was Flavia seems evident from
the acrostic contained in the first verse. She must also have
been a pneumatic or spiritual from her husband’s confident
expectation that she would be raised to the Heavenly
Jerusalem and by his assertion of her deathlessness. Hence it
may be inferred that Valentinus’ disciples even when of the
highest spiritual rank were allowed to marry. Cf. Clem. Alex.
Strom. Bk III. c. 17. The name “Angel of the Great Council” is
applied to Christ by Justin Martyr (c. Tryph. c. 126) who says
that He is so called by Ezekiel. The passage does not appear
in the Canon.
452. Matter, Hist. du Gnosticisme, t. II. p. 126, quoting St Jerome.
453. Epiphanius, Haer. XXXIII. c. 3, pp. 401-413, Oehler. Cf. “the

Elect Lady” to whom 2 John is addressed.
454. It should be remembered that Valentinus had been dead

some 50 years when Irenaeus and Hippolytus wrote.
455. Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. Chap. V., pp. 281-320 passim.

456. Julian, Ep. 43, tells Hecebolius that the Arians of Edessa,
“puffed up by their riches,” have maltreated the Valentinians,
and that he has therefore ordered the confiscation of the
estates and treasure of the Church of Edessa. It is doubtful
whether the edict can have been enforced before the
emperor’s death abrogated it.
457. We get at a sort of minimum date for its persistence from the
career of St Ambrose, who had been a Valentinian in his
youth (see Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. Bk VI. c. 18), and was made
bishop of Milan in 374 A.D., he being then 34 years old. The
sect therefore had adherents in Italy about 360 A.D.
458. It may be news to some that an attempt has lately been made
to revive in Paris the heresy of Valentinus. See the
Contemporary Review for May, 1897, or Jules Bois’ Les Petits
Religions de Paris, where a full account of the services and
hymns of “L’Église Gnostique” is given. Its founder, Jules
Doinel, was reconverted to Catholicism some time before his
death. Its present head is M. Fabre des Essarts.
459. The chapter on Marcion and his doctrines should perhaps in

strict chronological order follow on here, as Marcion’s
teaching was either contemporary with, or at most, but a few
years later than, that of Valentinus. Cf. Salmon in Dict.
Christian Biog. s.v. Marcion, Valentinus. But the earliest
documents in the Pistis Sophia are, as will be seen, possibly
by Valentinus himself, and, as all of them are closely
connected with his doctrine, it seemed a pity to postpone their
consideration.
460. W. E. Crum, Catalogue of the Coptic MS. in the Brit. Mus.,
1905, p. 173, n. 2, says that it was bought at the sale of
Askew’s effects for £10. 10s. 0d., and that Askew himself
bought it from a bookseller.
461. H. Hyvernat, Album de Paléographie Copte, Paris, 1888.
462. Matter, Hist. du Gnost. t. II. pp. 39-43, 347-348, and t. III. pp.
368-371.
463. See the present writer’s article “Some Heretic Gospels” in the
Scottish Review for July, 1893, where the MSS. treated of in
this chapter and their divisions are described in detail.
Schmidt, Koptisch-gnostische Schriften, Bd I. p. 14, speaks of
this “Codex Askewianus” as “eine Miszellenhandschrift.”
464. Except where otherwise specified, subsequent references

here to Pistis Sophia (in Italics) are to the first 253 pages of
the Coptic MS. only.
465. Cf. the ἐσώτερον τοῦ καταπετάσματος “within the veil” of Heb.
vi. 19. For other instances of its use in this sense see Crum,
Cat. of the Coptic MSS. in the Brit. Mus. p. 255, n. 1; and
Clem. Alex. Strom. Bk V. c. 6. For the dove, Mr F. C.
Conybeare, in a paper on the subject read before the Society
of Historical Theology in Dec. 1892 (see Academy of 3rd Dec.
1892), said that the dove was “the recognised symbol of the
Holy Spirit or Logos in the allegorizing theology of the
Alexandrine Jews at the beginning of the 1st century A.D.,” and
quoted several passages from Philo in support. Cf. Origen,
cont. Cels. Bk I. c. 31. But it was also the emblem, perhaps
the totem-animal, of the great Asiatic goddess who, under the
name of Astarte or Aphrodite, was worshipped as the Mater
viventium or “Mother of all Living,” with whose worship the
serpent was also connected. It was doubtless to this that the
text “Be ye wise as serpents, harmless as doves” refers. Both
serpents and doves figure largely in the Mycenaean and
Cretan worship of the goddess. See Ronald Burrows,
Discoveries in Crete, 1907, pp. 137, 138, and Index for
references. In later Greek symbolism the dove was sacred to
the infernal Aphrodite or Persephone whose name of
Φερρεφάττα or Φερσεφάττα has been rendered “she who
bears the dove.” See de Chanot, “Statues Iconiques de
Chypre” in Gazette Archéologique, 1878, p. 109.
466. Pistis Sophia, p. 152, Copt. This metaphor is first met with in
Philo, Quaest. in Genesim, Bk I. c. 53, who declares that the
“coats of skin” of Gen. iii, 21 are the natural bodies with which
the souls of the protoplasts were clothed. It was a favourite
figure of speech with the Alexandrian Jewish writers. So in the
Ascensio Isaiae, c. IV. 16, 17: “But the saints will come with
the Lord with their garments which are now stored up on high
in the seventh heaven: with the Lord will they come, whose
spirits are clothed.... And afterwards they will turn themselves
upward in their garments, and their body will be left in this
world.” Cf. Charles, Ascension of Isaiah, pp. 34, 35, and
Eschatology (Jowett Lectures), pp. 399 sqq., where he says
that this was also the teaching of St Paul.
467. The word Σωτήρ, which here as elsewhere in the book

appears without any Coptic equivalent, evidently had a
peculiar signification to the Valentinian Gnostics. Irenaeus, Bk
I. c. 1, § 1, p. 12, Harvey, says that it was the name they gave
to Jesus oὐδὲ γὰρ κύριον ὀνομάζειν αὐτὸν θέλουσι “for they
do not choose to call Him Lord.” In the later part of the book,
the document called Mέρoς τευχῶν Σωτῆρος (p. 253, Copt.)
says that “he is saviour and ὰχώρητος (i.e. not to be confined
in space), who finds the words of the mysteries and the words
of the Third Receptacle which is within (i.e. the inmost of the
three) and excelleth them all.” From which it would appear
that the chief qualification of a saviour in the eyes of the later
Valentinians was that he was not restricted to his special
place in the universe, but could visit at will the worlds below
him. We seem therefore to be already getting near the
Manichaean idea of Burkhans (messengers or Buddhas) who
are sent into the world for its salvation. Cf. Chapter XIII infra.
468. So that Judas Iscariot received a super-excellent soul as well

as the other eleven, unless we are to suppose that his
successor and substitute Matthias was one of those chosen
from the beginning. It is curious that neither in this nor in any
other Valentinian document is there any allusion to the
treason of Judas. The phrase “Archons of the aeons” means,
as will be seen later, the rulers of the twelve signs of the
Zodiac.
469. The “Sphere,” here as elsewhere in the book, means the

sphere of the visible firmament, which is below that of
Heimarmene or Destiny.
470. Τhis παρθένος τοῦ φωτός or Virgin of Light appears here, I

think, for the first time in any Gnostic document, although she
may have been known to the Valentinians. See Irenaeus, Bk
II. c. 47, § 2, p. 368, Harvey. She is, perhaps, a lower
analogue of Sophia Without, and is represented as seated in
or near the material sun which is said to give its light in its
“true form” only in her τόπος or place, which is 10,000 times
more luminous than that of the Great Propator or Forefather
mentioned later (Pistis Sophia, p. 194, Copt.). Her function
seems to be the “judging” of the souls of the dead, which does
not apparently involve any weighing of evidence, but merely
the examination of them to see what “mysteries” they have
received in previous incarnations, which will determine the
bodies in which they are reincarnated or their translation to
higher spheres (ibid. pp. 239, 292). She also places in the
soul a power which returns to her, according to the Μέρος
τευχῶν Σωτῆρος, on the death of its possessor (ibid. p. 284,
Copt.), thereby discharging the functions assigned in the last
book of Plato’s Republic to Lachesis. She is also on the same
authority (i.e. the Μ. τ. Σ.) one of the rulers of the disk of the
sun and of that of the moon (ibid. pp. 340-341, Copt.), and her
place is one of the “places of the Middle” and is opposite to
the kingdom of Adamas, which is called the “head of the
aeons” (ibid. p. 236, Copt.). She reappears in Manichaeism
and it is said in the Acta Archelai that at the destruction of the
world she will pass into “the ship” of the moon along with
Jesus and other powers where she will remain until the whole
earth is burnt up (c. XIII. p. 21 of Hegemonius, Acta Archelai,
Beeson’s ed., Leipzig, 1906, p. 21). In the Turfan texts (F. W.
K. Müller, Handschriften-Reste in Estrangelo Schrift aus
Turfan, III. Teil, Berlin, 1904, p. 77) appears a fragment of a
prayer in which is invoked yîšô kanîgrôšanâ which Dr Müller
translates Ἰησοῦς παρθένος τοῦ φωτός, “Jesus, Virgin of
Light”; but it is possible that there is some mistake in the
reading.
471. Barbelo is a name very frequently met with in the earlier

heresiologists. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 26, §§ 1, 2, pp. 221-226,
Harvey, declares that there was a sect of Simonians called
Barbeliotae “or Naassenes” who suppose “a certain
indestructible (the Latin version says ‘never-ageing’) Aeon in
a living virgin spirit whom they call Barbelo (masc.),” and
gives an account of a string of other aeons issuing not from,
but at the prayer of, this Barbelo, which is far from clear in the
present state of the text. The sect appears, from what can be
made out of his description, to have resembled the Ophites, of
which it may have been a branch. Hippolytus, however, says
nothing of them, and the account of Epiphanius (Haer. XXV.
and XXVI., Vol. II, pt 1, pp. 160, 184), Oehler, is untrustworthy,
inasmuch as he assigns the worship of Barbelo to two sects,
one of which he calls Nicolaitans and the other Gnostics
simply. To both of them he attributes after his manner
unimaginably filthy rites, and it is plain from his making
Barbelo the mother of Jaldabaoth and giving her a seat in the
eighth heaven that he confuses her wilfully or otherwise with
the Sophia of the Ophites. Her place in the system of the
Pistis Sophia will be described in the text. The name is said
by Harvey to be derived from the Syriac Barba elo, the Deity

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News on the Right: Studying

Conservative News Cultures Anthony

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​091353–​3 (pbk.)

Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada

List of Figures and Tables vii

1. Taking Conservative News Seriously 1

2. “From a Christian Perspective”: News/​Talk in Evangelical Mass

3. Containing “Country Music Marxism”: How Fox News

4. Weaponizing Victimhood: Discourses of Oppression and the

5. NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics 84

6. Making Media Safe for Corporate Power: Market Libertarian

7. Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure 123

8. The British Right-​Wing Mainstream and the European

9. Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media: Propagandists for a

10. National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights

11. Slanting the News: Media Bias and Its Effects 190

12. Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream: Methodological

13. Conservative News Studies: Mapping an Unrealized Field 232

5.1 Sources of NRA Front-​Page Headlines, mid-​June 2017 to February

This project began with a chance conversation at the Joint Journalism

shared such wide-​ranging perspectives on and enthusiasm for talking about

Taking Conservative News Seriously

In February 1962, CBS News broadcast a special report on right-​wing extremism

decades. Meanwhile, political communication scholars Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Conservative News Is Not New

Defining “Conservative News Cultures”

to imagine themselves as part of a broader right-​wing public or movement. In yet

An Imperative for Journalism Studies and Beyond

In her chapter on “NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics,”

a competition to meet consumer demand. Yet, as Pickard suggests, it also cre-

a broader mediated terrain of respectability politics. Whether by policing the

formation of conservative or liberal political attitudes. Analyzing public opinion

a growing interdisciplinary conversation about conservative news, both in the

“From a Christian Perspective”

The literature on the conservative media establishment is extensive and growing.

(Miller 1993, 1994) distinct from economic, small-​government, and libertarian

Waiting for the “Right” Moment

mainstream of evangelical broadcasters stuck to positively preaching their own

A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional

(twelve in each band) in 1985; to thirty-​six (eighteen in each band) in 1992,

news/​talk picked up by affiliates in smaller markets, and American Family Radio

Operationalizing a “Christian Worldview”

Genre as the Basis for Rhetorical Community

Table 2.1 Promotional Statements for Christian Radio News Services

one concrete space-​time” (71). Genre supplies to members of a rhetorical com-

Table 2.2 Opening Bumpers of American Family Radio Talk Shows

Today’s Issues1 Announcer: Welcome to Today’s Issues, offering a Christian

Table 2.2 Continued

* All airtimes are United States Central Time Zone

for his involvement in a national “Presidential Prayer Team.” By contrast, Bean’s

A Day in the Life of “Christian Radio”

legitimate religious concerns and even “problematic . . . when, as is often the

[Miller:] “That the author is a garbage author of a garbage book.” A top

A leading decency advocate says the reason we have so much “smutty

SCOTUS: 5th Circuit Alliance “[T]‌here really is no constitutional

Table 2.4 Continued

Crossovers Between Christian and

376. Hippolytus, op. cit. c. 32: ἔδοξεν αὐτοῖς μὴ μόνον κατὰ

ISBN 978–0–19–091353–3 (pbk.)

List of Figures and Tables  vii

1. Taking Conservative News Seriously  1

2. “From a Christian Perspective”: News/Talk in Evangelical Mass

5. NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics  84

7. Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure  123

8. The British Right-Wing Mainstream and the European

11. Slanting the News: Media Bias and Its Effects  190

13. Conservative News Studies: Mapping an Unrealized Field  232

5.1 Sources of NRA Front-Page Headlines, mid-June 2017 to February

shared such wide-ranging perspectives on and enthusiasm for talking about

In February 1962, CBS News broadcast a special report on right-wing extremism

to imagine themselves as part of a broader right-wing public or movement. In yet

(Miller 1993, 1994) distinct from economic, small-government, and libertarian

(twelve in each band) in 1985; to thirty-six (eighteen in each band) in 1992,

news/talk picked up by affiliates in smaller markets, and American Family Radio

Table 2.1 Promotional Statements for Christian Radio News Services

one concrete space-time” (71). Genre supplies to members of a rhetorical com-

Table 2.2 Opening Bumpers of American Family Radio Talk Shows