A01=Bryan H. Thrift
Affirmative Action
American South
Author_Bryan H. Thrift
Barry Goldwater
Black Power
Bryan Hardin Thrift
Category=JBCT
Category=JPFM
Category=NHK
Civil Rights
coalition
conservative
Conservative Bias
culture wars
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eq_history
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eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Fairness Doctrine
Federal Communication Commission
free enterprise
history
liberal
North Carolina Bankers Association
political change
protest
Republican Party
Richard Nixon
right-wing
school-led prayer
sexual revolution
television
U.S. Senate
United States
Vietnam War
Watts riot
Product details
- ISBN 9780813062341
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 151 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 27 Sep 2016
- Publisher: University Press of Florida
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Before Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, there was Jesse Helms. From in front of a camera at WRAL-TV, Helms forged a new brand of southern conservatism long before he was a senator from North Carolina. As executive vice president of the station, Helms delivered commentaries on the evening news and directed the news and entertainment programming. He pioneered the attack on the liberal media, and his editorials were some of the first shots fired in the culture wars, criticizing the influence of “immoral entertainment.” Through the emerging power of the household television Helms established a blueprint and laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement.
Bryan Thrift mines over 2,700 WRAL-TV “Viewpoint” editorials broadcast between 1960 and 1972 to offer not only a portrait of a skilled rhetorician and wordsmith but also a lens on the way the various, and at times competing, elements of modern American conservatism cohered into an ideology couched in the language of anti-elitism and “traditional values.” Decades prior to the invention of the blog, Helms corresponded with his viewers to select, refine, and sharpen his political message until he had reworked southern traditionalism into a national conservative movement. The realignment of southern Democrats into the Republican Party was not easy or inevitable, and by examining Helms’s oft-forgotten journalism career, Thrift shows how delicately and deliberately this transition had to be cultivated.
Bryan Thrift mines over 2,700 WRAL-TV “Viewpoint” editorials broadcast between 1960 and 1972 to offer not only a portrait of a skilled rhetorician and wordsmith but also a lens on the way the various, and at times competing, elements of modern American conservatism cohered into an ideology couched in the language of anti-elitism and “traditional values.” Decades prior to the invention of the blog, Helms corresponded with his viewers to select, refine, and sharpen his political message until he had reworked southern traditionalism into a national conservative movement. The realignment of southern Democrats into the Republican Party was not easy or inevitable, and by examining Helms’s oft-forgotten journalism career, Thrift shows how delicately and deliberately this transition had to be cultivated.
Bryan Hardin Thrift is associate professor of history at Tougaloo College, USA.
