Speaking the language of everyday people rather than the Democratic lexicon of programmatic liberalism, the right has enjoyed a rhetorical advantage in American politics for decades. Republican domination of the airwaves and fiber-optic cable networks is certain to increase during the next election cycle. Following the success of Rising Tide, the party is about to begin producing a second show, Listening to America, a title lifted, ironically, from the liberal television journalist Bill Moyers. Republicans are using their high-tech studio to produce ready-to-air sound bites and interviews for more than 700 local television stations that don’t mind a little propaganda in their daily fare. For local activists, the Republican National Committee also produces interactive interview programs that feature senators, House representatives and state leaders and that enable believers to plot legislative strategy and grass-roots lobbying campaigns. “We are trying to get information to the viewer unfiltered by the media elites,” says Barbour. “Talk radio helps, so does C-SPAN, and GOP-TV is another opportunity.”

More significant than the weekly TV shows, which are, after all, nakedly partisan, is the independent network of print reports and radio, television and computer news and programming that purports to be independent but, in fact, pummels voters with an unceasing drumbeat of Republican propaganda. At the center of this network is the right-wing entrepreneur Paul Weyrich, the head of the Free Congress Foundation and the founder of National Empowerment Television, now called the NET Political NewsTalk Network.

Weyrich has been kicking around Washington for years, an ideological general in the Reaganite army and a major pain in the neck for the more moderate George Bush. A former radio host born to Republican Roman Catholic parents on the ethnic south side of Racine, Wis., Weyrich became the founding president of the Heritage Foundation in 1973 before organizing the Free Congress Foundation with a grant from the conservative Coors family. Weyrich started NET in December 1993, and Barbour credits him as the inspiration for the idea of Rising Tide. NET’s programming is strictly ideological, featuring Republican stars like Gingrich, presidential hopeful Rep. Robert Dornan and Arianna Huffington, the wealthy conservative wife of Michael Huffington, the failed U.S. senatorial candidate from California.