The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) went on the
air October 1, 1961, in a cramped UHF station in Portsmouth, Virginia, through the initiative of Marion Gordon
“Pat” Robertson, the thirty-one-year-old son of A. Willis
Robertson, a thirty-four-year veteran of the U.S. House
and Senate. The young Robertson received a Masters of
Divinity degree from New York Theological Seminary in
1959 and was determined to use television as an instrument
of mass evangelism. Initially, the station struggled financially. In the fall of 1963 it held its first telethon, asking
seven hundred viewers to pledge $10 monthly to meet the
ministry’s $7,000 in operating expenses. The success of the
strategy led to the premier in 1966 of “The 700 Club,” a
daily broadcast of prayer, interviews, and Christian music,
based on the format of NBC‘s “The Tonight Show.” By the
end of the decade nearly one hundred affiliated stations
were broadcasting the show. CBN became a network when
it purchased an Atlanta television station in 1971, a Dallas
station in 1973, and a Boston station in 1977. By the 1970s,
CBN was the nation’s most watched religious broadcast
network producing news and public affairs programming
through a cable and satellite distribution system designed
to serve as an alternative to the nation’s three major television networks.
Using satellite communication, CBN expanded worldwide. “The 700 Club” was first broadcast internationally on
July 2, 1975, to Europe. Its debut in Asia began on November 7, 1976. The network unveiled a new “700 Club” magazine format on April 29, 1977, focusing on news and public
affairs reporting that reached a domestic and international
audience over the network’s earth satellite station based in
Virginia Beach. Satcom and Weststar satellites transmitted
the show and other network programming to an estimated
audience of more than one million through two hundred
affiliated stations. By late 1977, the network aired in cities
in Japan, Taiwan, and Puerto Rico, and beginning in 1978,
Hong Kong. In April, 1979, the network opened a news
bureau in Washington, D.C., responsible for producing live
satellite feeds from Capitol Hill and through transmission
facilities in the National Press Building. Its first overseas
news bureau filed stories and conducted satellite interviews
from Jerusalem, beginning in May, 1981. The Jerusalem
bureau also produced news and public affairs programming
in English and Arabic through Middle East Television, a
CBN subsidiary, to six countries in the region.
By 1985, CBN generated $250 million in annual revenues from a state of the art broadcast facility in Virginia
Beach, Virginia, that featured four large studios and a staff
of more than four hundred. “The 700 Club,“ hosted by Robertson, could now reach 96 percent of all American households on 228 television stations and an estimated 300 radio
stations. News stories focused on the major problems of the
period, including the arms race, the environment, the collapsing infrastructure of American cities, the inequalities of
the developed and developing worlds, the rise of organized
crime, the sexual revolution, racism, drug abuse, attacks
on the integrity of the family, abortion, the deterioration of
the nation’s public schools, its activist courts, and the social
and spiritual consequences of unchecked affluence.
The network’s news operation experienced growing
internal debate over story treatments. News professionals
emphasized balance, fairness and essential impartiality.
Robertson, preparing a presidential run, favored stories that
played to the network’s conservative supporters.
Robertson’s annual appearances before the National
Religious Broadcasters convention in Washington increasingly took on the appearance of campaign rallies. On October 1, 1987, Robertson temporarily left the network to run
for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. His second place finish in the Iowa caucus stimulated an upsurge in
news stories on the growth of the “Christian right” and its
use of mass media to push a conservative political agenda.
Religious broadcasting was now big business. Fourteen
hundred radio stations, thirty television stations and sixtysix cable systems, reaching thirty-six million viewers a
week, specialized in religious broadcasting. They produced
annual revenues of half a billion dollars. Robertson’s efforts
to harness this spiritual enthusiasm for his presidential campaign ultimately failed and by mid-July, 1988, he returned
to serve as president of the Christian Broadcasting Network
and host of “The 700 Club.“ There, he decried a “liberal
media establishment” whose news organizations claimed
objectivity while “masking their basic bias” (off-air recording of “The 700 Club,” July 14, 1988).
CBN‘s reach expanded as the new millennium
approached. Network programming penetrated the former
Soviet Union on December 23, 1990 with East Bloc countries joining the network in 1992 and 1993. CBN targeted
parts of Africa and the Caribbean in the years that followed.
RCA’s Satcom III satellite began broadcasting the network’s
programming worldwide twenty-four hours a day and the
sale of CBN’s Family Entertainment subsidiary on June 11,
1997, to Fox created $136.1 million in additional revenues
that the network used in satellite programming throughout
the Middle East and Asia. The network’s Regent University
produced graduates in journalism and mass communication who developed programming for two hundred nations,
heard in more than seventy languages, including Russian,
Arabic, Spanish, French, and Chinese. A new initiative by
the network in 2001 built alliances with producers in local
communities in programming to Latin America, Africa,
the Muslim world, Europe, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, the
Philippines, and China.
Robertson may not have succeeded in building a fourth
alternative television network to rival ABC, CBS, and NBC.
However, the network’s news operation demonstrated there
was a public appetite for a conservative alternative to establishment broadcast media, a recognition that paved the way
for Fox News and cable’s niche news programming in the
years that followed.
Further Reading
Abelman, Robert. “News on the ‘700 Club’ after Pat Robertson’s
Political Fall,“ Journalism Quarterly, Winter 1990.
Gaddy, Gary D. “The Power of the Religious Media: Religious
Broadcast Use and the Role of Religious Organizations
in Public Affairs,” Review of Religious Research, Spring
1984.
Gerbner, George, Larry Gross, Stewart Hoover, Michael Morgan,
and Nancy Signorielli. Religion and Television, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1982.
Hadden, Jeffrey, and Charles Swann. Prime Time Preachers,
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1981.
Harrell, Jr., David Edwin. Pat Robertson: A Personal, Religious
and Political Portrait, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.
Robertson, Pat, and Jamie Buckingham. Shout It from the Housetops, Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1972.
Robertson, Pat and Bob Slosser. The Secret Kingdom, Nashville:
Thomas Nelson, 1982.
Bruce J. Evensen