Former Executive producer for the 700 Club explain how they were Fox News before Fox News and how "Liberal" became a dirty word.

Boo! Run, the Liberals are coming!

This HuffPo piece was written by Terry Heaton, a former 700 Club executive producer, who worked with Pat Robertson to manufacture the fake news that has now become a hallmark of the conservative media.

Here is an excerpt from his piece: 

Before Fox News, there was The 700 Club with CBN News and “TV Journalism With A Different Spirit.” We knew what we were doing in the exploitation of the word “liberal,” and truth-telling demands its deconstruction today. The all-or-nothing split between conflicting political narratives has reached its pinnacle with the election of Donald Trump, and it needs to be hacked into a million pieces.

William F. Buckley was among the first to give the word “liberal” a pejorative interpretation, but it was the wordsmith William Safire writing for Spiro Agnew who in 1969 elevated it to a political talking point in his famous speech that opened the war against the press during Richard Nixon’s secret battles in Vietnam. The word became the central weapon in a strategy that involved attacking the messenger instead of changing the message. 

That political strategy has been so effective to date that it has given birth to the idea that mainstream news is actually “fake news” and not to be believed in the administration of President Donald Trump. The number of people who now believe this falsehood is staggering, and it poses a real threat to our democracy. 

At The 700 Club, we exploited attacking the press in order to insert ourselves to the right of everybody else in presenting a Biblical, a.k.a. Republican perspective on current events. We offered a daily news program that expressed Republican party talking points that we marketed as a Christian worldview. Thus began the shifting of evangelicals to the GOP and the shifting of the GOP to the right. We served as the intellectual wing of the Moral Majority, although there was no theological love lost between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. 

So let’s look at these events closely, because it has a direct bearing on the conflict today. Let me be very clear: the right-wing “news” that we created was a political response to the progressive nature of news and information. It’s important to understand this, because “right-wing news” is oxymoronic. There is no such thing, because the right represents olds, not news. By definition, news is new, and new is progressive. That conservatives view this as a bias is fine, but elevating that to some evil command-and-control mechanism for political liberals is a false narrative. Rush Limbaugh has made a living off of this phony hegemony, as well as Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and whole host of mostly broadcasting personalities. Why? Because it sells and has been selling for almost 50 years. 

But it’s entirely false, for the press is not the purveyor of fake news. That title belongs with those who create stories for political gain and clickthroughs. It may be politically expedient to label the mainstream as fake, but in order to do so, one’s source must be propaganda and nothing else. 

This is the model that was embraced, and promoted by Roger Ailes on Fox News.

He, like the 700 Club, recognized that there was a whole segment of the population who did not like hearing news stories that made them feel left behind by progress or marginalized because they lacked the education to understand the complexities of the world they were describing.

Instead they wanted conservative feel good stories that painted folks like themselves as heroes, and vilified the liberal "elites" who seemed like alien life forms to their rural sensibilities.

So today we are faced with open attacks on education, and educators, a dismissal of actual facts, and a deep mistrust for any media that is not Fox News, the Christian Broadcasting Network, or Right Wing talk radio.

And what happens when these folks are pandered to, and made to feel empowered?

Yep, that is exactly what you get.