NET's Stealth Broadcasting
Cute "Conservative" TV Network
Pursues Extremist Mission

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If the leaders of the religious right fail to seize control of this country before the Millennium, they will at least be able to tell God that they tried. Not satisfied with the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Family Channel or even the domination of radio by Rush Limbaugh and his hundreds of imitators, America's Bible jocks are about to inaugurate yet another cable network, this one to be known as National Empowerment Television.

On the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, The New York Times noted rather breezily that NET will begin broadcasting 24 hours a day, seven days a week from its Washington studios on Dec. 6. The new network's presumed aim is to transform the dry pap of conservative wonkdom into a smooth pop video fix. While the paper of record understood that this was news important enough for page 1 (though it had already been reported elsewhere), the story was mostly played as a cute trend piece, tinged with the excess of attitude over substance that is becoming Times style.

NET, The Times suggested condescendingly, will be another example of "niche programming" like the Food Network or the Sci-Fi Channel. After all, the network has scheduled a weekly wine show called "The Vine Line." It's going to broadcast "home videos on local government." And U.S. Representative Newt Gingrich, that kinder, gentler Republican leader, will star in his own program showcasing government "success stories." Isn't that special?

The Times inexplicably omitted the wackiest bit: a daily morning show hosted by a married couple, Dan and Nancy Mitchell, who are both economists at right-wing Washington, D.C., think tanks. Great concept sort of Curtis and Lisa meet Milton Friedman for breakfast.

But the people behind NET are not cute wackos. Nor is NET simply another cable network. It's a propaganda outlet with concealed purposes and methods quite different from the relatively wholesome commercialism of CNN, QVC or MTV.

The man who dreamed up NET, Free Congress Foundation president Paul Weyrich, has long been the single most important figure in Christian fundamentalist politics, although in recent years he has had to share that distinction with the Rev. Pat Robertson; the two of them have collaborated closely on the new network, as they also have in building Mr. Robertson's political organization, the Christian Coalition. In March 1992, the coalition' s monthly publication, "Christian American", carried an article about Mr. Weyrich's satellite network, which was candidly described as a tool to cultivate right-wing evangelical political action. Indeed, NET was forged to enhance communications between leaders of the Christian Coalition and its cadres in churches acros s the nation, a task the network will continue to fulfill in secret.

When NET began broadcasting for a few hours a week in 1991, its audience was limited to active members of Christian Coalition chapters and other, similar groups that arranged to pick up its signal on a satellite dish. With only one northern Virginia cable system so far having agreed to pick up its broadcasts, most viewers of NET's 2 hour service still will be receiving it via satellite at first.

NET's initial aim was to mobilize rank and file Christians behind whatever political action Messrs. Weyrich, Robertson and company back in Washington deemed urgent that week. That function will continue as Mr. Weyrich explained to the closed national conference of the Christian Coalition on Sept. 10th with a weekly NET message separate from the network's mass-audience programming. Such covert "narrowcasts" will be carefully protected from casual interception, their satellite coordinates changed every week and faxed only to selected activists across the country.

The uses to which such stealth broadcasting has already been put by the religious right cast doubt upon NET's professed "nonpartisan" stance. Marching orders aired by the network have powerfully abetted such highly partisan endeavors as the "borking" of Lani Guinier, the ouster of National Endowment for the Arts chairman John Frohnmayer and the confirmation of Clarence Thomas.

Still more troubling are certain associations of Mr. Weyrich himself, a former columnist for the John Birch Society magazine who will have his own daily 5 P.M. call-in show on NET. Although he now professes faith in "democratic capitalism," much of what Mr. Weyrich has done and said is considerably less reassuring. When convicted Nazi collaborator Laszlo Pasztor was dismissed from the Bush-Quayle campaign in 1988, for example, along with several comrades of similarly sinister background, it was discovered that he worked for Mr. Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation. He still does.

Equally disturbing is the Weyrich worldview, a familiar brand of intolerance that divides American politics into "the age-old conflict between good and evil, between the forces of God and the forces against God," as he put it. Probably that is why another of NET's daily prime time programs, innocuously dubbed "American Family," will be hosted by a man whose chief preoccupation is the destruction of Planned Parenthood, a goal he has pursued with the help of Operation Rescue zealots.

Those who cherish religious, reproductive and intellectual freedom may wonder whether it is true, as The Times reported, that such mainstream companies as Braun, Phillips CD1 and Time-Life Music have agreed to become advertising sponsors of NET and if so, why.

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