This is another bonus episode of Landslide.

It's a production of nuanced tales in partnership with WFAE and distributed by the NPR Network.

In the early in mid-1970s, hundreds of thousands of people, and then millions of people,

began to receive a certain kind of letter in their mailboxes.

They opened direct mail that alerted them to a conservative cause, a backlash to new

textbooks or women's rights, for instance. The letters contained alarmist, apocalyptic language,

and then asked for money. But they weren't just fundraising.

These letters from The New Right were an alternative form of media.

The only communications channel that you had directly to conservatives was mail.

Leaders of the New Right obsessed over the news and how to have their own news.

The publisher Richard Vickery expanded to launch magazines, conservative digest, and The New Right Report.

But there was one long-held media goal the New Right sought to achieve and failed at over and over, before a stunning success.

They wanted their own television news channel.

Catherine Kramer Brownell is a professor of history at Purdue, and the author of the book 24-7

politics, and she's here to sketch out what the New Right wanted from television news,

what it attempted to do, and how it played in to today's media landscape. Katie, thanks so much

for joining me. Thanks so much for having me. I want to start in the middle, right where we just heard,

which is New Right Right Leaders wanted a piece of television news.

Why did they want it? What opportunity did they see with television? And then let's talk about their

first effort to get it. So they saw television, as so many people did, across the political

spectrum in American politics in the 1970s as the source of political power.

They were convinced that the dominant television programming that so many people, millions of

...