ary religious radio programming was overseen by the Federal Council of Churches' Department of National Religious Radio, composed of 24 cooperating denominations. The Federal Council of Churches did not include evangelical denominations, which soon protested that they were victims of a conspiracy to squeeze them out of radio airtime. In 1944, the evangelicals formed the National Religious Broadcasters and launched a massive campaign to rectify the inequities in the distribution of airtime. The evangelicals met with limited success but failed to win extensive victory.
With the advent of television during the 1950s, liberal Protestants once again attempted to exclude the evangelicals from representation with the networks. Enraged at its failure to break into network television, the National Religious Broadcasters established lobbying relationships with conservatives in Congress. The lobbying paid off in 1960 when a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) directive obliterated the public interest distinction between free and paid religious airtime. According to Hadden and Shupe (1988), "The implication of the 1960 ruling was that local stations could sell airtime for religious programs and still get "public interest credit" in the eyes of the FCC" (p. 51).
The 1960 FCC ruling allowed evangelical broadcasters to purchase all the airtime they wanted, and fierce competition ensued. Even networks with policies that previously prohibited religious programming jumped on the bandwagon because of the unprecedented demand. Mainline denominations found it impossible to compete with evangelical broadcasters who could commit substantial percentages of their financial resources to purchasing television airtime and equipment: "Unhampered by denominational bureaucracies or any other 'normal' church apparatus . . . evangelicals have drawn their sustenance from the mass audience, and, in turn, have been able to cater almost exclusively to ...