But Edward Atsinger, the co-founder and ceo of Salem Communications, pays little attention to such complaints. He sees nothing sinister in growing his company or promoting conservative, Judeo-Christian values. He, too, was once one of the little guys, scrabbling to keep a station on the air. Everything he built, he did the right way.

Atsinger purchased his first radio license in Garner, North Carolina, in 1967. The FCC stipulated that his station not broadcast into nearby Raleigh, a restriction he hadn't anticipated. So Atsinger paid extra for a three-tower transmitter that would blanket his suburb without encroaching on the city nearby. He gave the station a country music format, hired several employees, and managed to oversee the entire operation while living and teaching in Los Angeles.

Whenever it rained, employees heading back and forth to the station—housed in a mobile home in a converted cow pasture—would get stuck in mud.

"You think back on that and say, 'I really don't want to go back and have to do that again,' but you wouldn't trade that experience for anything," Atsinger says now. "You gain a lot of confidence."

Flush with the success of keeping a low-power, small-market station financially afloat, Atsinger entered two ventures in the early 1970s that shaped the rest of his career. First, he initiated a partnership with Salem co-founder Stuart Epperson, acquiring with him an oldies station in Bakersfield, California. Both graduates of Bob Jones University, Atsinger and Epperson were also linked by a close family connection: Epperson had married Atsinger's sister several years earlier.

Next, Atsinger bought a station in Oxnard, California, just miles from Salem's current corporate headquarters, and transformed it into a Christian teaching and talk station. Within a few years, Epperson and Atsinger had plunged headlong into Christian radio, selling all of their other stations.
A Winning Formula

According to chief operating officer Joe Davis, Salem offers Christian radio two indispensable values: a stable presence in the market and a high-contact relationship with listeners. The first distinctive is due primarily to Salem's size and public financing, which allows it to float large investments; the second, to Davis himself.

A former Salem station manager, Davis created the archetype for Salem's successful teaching-and-talk stations. Within six months after Salem purchased New York City's WMCA-AM in 1989 for more than $12 million, Davis began receiving cancellation letters from national program producers. Listener response wasn't bringing in enough donations for them to afford his airtime.

In desperation, Davis negotiated rate cuts and brainstormed a program to raise his station's profile. Called the "church of the week," its rules were simple: If Davis could speak in a church's Sunday morning service and distribute a station guide to all attendees, he would air the church's Sunday morning service and interview its senior pastor during the following week.

Within three years, Davis had visited 154 congregations—"churches of all kinds, denominations, racial groups, and geographical areas [within the city]"—buoyed his listenership, and brought in the response program producers needed to afford staying on the air.

"At that time, nobody had ever done anything like this before," Davis says. "Now, it's an important part of our entire operation that we minister to pastors and the gatekeepers."

Program producers large and small appreciate Salem's high-touch approach and major-market stability. "Salem is a business that is continually trying to help their [audience]," says Word of Life's Florida marketing director Dan Darling, "so they probably do more [for me] than the Christian stations that are listener-supported. … They're trying to earn my dollar."

Focus on the Family vice president John Fuller credits Salem with helping James Dobson's daily show to expand its reach—and Focus may now be the most listened to Christian radio program ever.

"I think as folks at [Salem] stations have endeavored to run their stations with greater professionalism and to add stations in certain regions and cities, we've benefited because we've been able to reach their audience," Fuller says. "Certainly, as Salem has grown, we have grown with them."

The key, says Davis, is to keep ministry to local listeners at the forefront. "Our mission on [Christian talk] stations is to help the church be the church," says Davis. "We understand that when God reaches a city, he doesn't do it through a radio station; he does it through the church. Our task is simply to come alongside, provide a platform—amplification—for that voice of the church, turn up the volume a bit, and allow them to reach the people that God has called them to reach."
Money Matters

But some in radio believe financial realities unduly influence Salem's decision-making. Radio veteran Chris Lash says his first encounter with Salem Communications came through a corporate lawyer's email. According to Lash, Salem's lawyer threatened further action if Lash didn't change the moniker of his western Pennsylvania radio station.

By some quirk of misfortune or creative minds thinking alike, Lash had developed a radio format similar to Salem's The Fish in the late 1990s, which he called Fish FM. He intended for it to air the kind of musical guests he invited to his local Christian rock festival, Godstock. But his idea took years to come to fruition. He began hosting a Fish FM website in 1998 and wasn't approved for a low-power FM radio license until 2003, three years after Salem launched its first Fish station in Los Angeles.

Six months after his 100-watt station took to the airwaves in rural Indiana, Pennsylvania—with a reach that barely touched nearby towns of Homer City and Clymer—Lash says he received the email from a Salem lawyer. Lash argued that he had come up with his format independently, before Salem, and that he could hardly be considered a competitor. The nearest music station owned by Salem was 175 miles away, in Cleveland.

But Salem wouldn't budge, Lash says. In the end, he changed his station's name to The Switch and let ownership of his Web domain expire.

"Here was the largest Christian broadcasting company in the world going after the smallest," Lash says. "It shed some light as to what kind of a company they really are."

The president of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), Frank Wright, defends Salem's business practices as above-board, even exemplary. "The fiduciary duties that directors of a public company have to their shareholders probably required them to defend [The Fish] brand," Wright says. Still, he admits that the "open question" on Salem is whether their Wall Street financing puts "pressure on them to make decisions that wouldn't have been made otherwise, because investors demand a return on their investment and Salem's stock price has been somewhat lower of late."

Like all media corporations specializing in radio, Salem's stock price has been on what chief financial officer David A. R. Evans calls "a bit of a roller coaster." From a high in 2004 of $33.08 per share, salm dropped to $11.19 per share by mid-December 2006.

The area where Salem's financing affects program producers most, perhaps, is in its airtime rates. As a publicly traded company, one of Salem's goals is to increase its revenue annually. It accomplishes this, in part, by charging teaching and talk programs more each year for their time slots. Such increases can make it hard for some of the programs listeners most appreciate to remain on-air—and it's not just small ministries that struggle to keep up with radio's expense.

This past September, John Piper's Desiring God ministry cancelled its half-hour program altogether. Matt Perman, Desiring God's director of internet strategies (and former director of radio), doesn't blame Salem for the show's demise. In fact, he praises co-founder and board chairman Stuart Epperson for the personal effort he put into making Desiring God's program work.

"[But Salem does] want to increase your rates by X percentage every year," Perman says, "and their rates are already high. Being on the side that I'm on, I would question: 'Are the rates representative of the value being received, given the [industry-wide] downturn in listenership and what the response actually is?'"

A former assistant operations manager of a Salem station cluster wonders if traditional, non-commercial Christian radio stations are better able to keep listeners' concerns prioritized above finances.

"For instance, I don't miss playing state lottery commercials," he says, referring to Salem's practice of airing outside programming, such as sports broadcasts, that occasionally contain advertisements the company would otherwise reject. "I [also] don't miss playing 'Work from home in your pajamas and make thousands a month!' commercials."
Mixed Frequencies

Before the Telecommunications Act of 1996, broadcasters could only own and operate one station in a given market. That meant, essentially, that they had to choose a format and run with it. Not anymore. With the act freeing broadcasters to own up to eight stations in large cities, major companies can now seek to be all things to all people—that is, in Salem's case, all people who are Christians, conservatives, or preferably both.

Some see in Salem's expansion a loss of ministry focus. Its Fish stations, for instance, broadcast Christian music and encouraging talk that's "safe for the whole family," but they rarely present any substantive teaching.

Without referencing Salem specifically, Charles Colson bemoaned the increasing popularity of music on Christian radio in a CT column last April. "What is the job of Christian radio, after all?" he wrote. "To give people what they want, or—as with any ministry—to give them what they need? Music is important in the life of the church and can inspire us to focus on Christ. But it cannot take the place of solid teaching."

In addition, when public affairs are discussed on Salem's Christian teaching and talk stations, listeners can expect to hear viewpoints that hew tightly to Republican priorities.