From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is away this week. I'm Bob Garfield.

Tonight, the sudden death and legacy of Jerry Falwell, who transformed the

loved and hated, respected, and despised.

A man who used the power, respected, and despised. Farwell was a...

A man who used the power of faith to wage political crusades has died.

Jerry Falwell's...

Jerry Falwell was many things in his 51-year pastoral career.

A religious fundamentalist who altered the course of American Protestant theology, a political

firebrand who galvanized evangelicals and others into a hardcore religious right.

But most of all, he was a creature of, by, and for the media.

His entire adult life was spent on television.

His death, naturally, was consecrated there.

He's a TV evangelist who helped turn the religious right into a very powerful political force.

Falwell began broadcasting the services of his Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1956.

As former Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed says, television was emerging as the major medium in modern society,

giving them the ability to reach tens and even hundreds of millions of people, not only in the

United States, but around the world,

that kind of projection of the evangelical message would have been unthinkable even 25 years

earlier. Falwell's ministry grew from 35 souls to 22,000 in Lynchburg and tens of millions more worldwide, the human core of a

religious financial and political colossus. By the time Falwell was approached by conservative

political strategists in 1979 to lead the moral majority organization, TV had already enriched him.

...