Conservative Bias

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. Bryan Thrift mines over 2,700 WRAL-TV “Viewpoint” editorials to offer a lens on the way the various elements of modern American conservatism cohered into an ideology couched in the language of anti-elitism and “traditional values”.

“Conservative Bias examines one of the most notorious figures of modern American politics: Jesse Helms. Thrift shows that Helms was not merely a right-wing demagogue but rather a brilliant media mastermind who built a national movement from a little television soundstage in Raleigh.”? - Neil J. Young, Princeton University

“In this careful, thoughtful, and thoroughly researched study, Bryan Hardin Thrift provides the first comprehensive study of Jesse Helms’s long career as a conservative journalist and television ideologue prior to his long tenure as a U.S. senator from North Carolina.”—William A. Link, author of Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism

“Traces a little-known, but pivotal, phase of Helms’s pre-senatorial career and explains how the future New Right leader used the power of local television broadcasts in the 1960s to forge a new ideology that moved the nation to the right.”—Daniel K. Williams, author of God’s Own Party

Bryan Hardin Thrift is associate professor of history at Tougaloo College, USA.