Broadcast Work

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A broadcast work entry records a specific radio or television program, network or production built around explicitly religious content, a sermon broadcast, a devotional program or a full religious network, distinct from a screen work in being produced primarily for ongoing transmission to a listening or viewing audience rather than as a single film or television production. Jeffrey Hadden and Anson Shupe's study of televangelism treats this broadcast religious phenomenon as a real institutional force in its own right, with its own economics, its own audience relationship and its own political consequence.

An entry records a broadcast work's founding, who created it and under what religious or institutional sponsorship, its format, and the scale and character of its audience where that is documented, since religious broadcasting ranges from a small local devotional program to a network reaching millions, and an entry records that scale as a specific, checkable fact rather than an impression.

Some broadcast works recorded here have drawn public controversy over their finances or their claims, and the entry records that scrutiny as a documented part of the work's own history, distinct from and alongside its religious content and its stated devotional purpose.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Stewart Hoover's study of the electronic church approaches religious broadcasting from the audience's side rather than the broadcaster's, interviewing actual viewers about what religious television meant to them personally and how it fit into the rest of their religious and daily lives, a method that complicates any simple account of a broadcast work as either purely sincere ministry or purely commercial enterprise.

That audience centered method matters for a broadcast work entry because a program's stated devotional purpose and its actual, documented effect on the people who watch or listen to it are frequently two separate facts worth recording rather than assuming one straightforwardly explains the other, a religious broadcast reaching very different audiences in very different ways than its own producers may describe.

A broadcast work entry tries to hold both halves of that picture together, a work's own stated religious mission and content, and, where it is documented, how an actual audience received and used it, since studying religious broadcasting seriously means treating it as a real, measurable media phenomenon and not only as an extension of the religious content it carries.