Volume 21 Issue 3, Fall 2009, p. 4

Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) ranks among the largest television station conglomerates and the most longstanding televangelist programmers in America today. Since its founding in 1973, TBN has published promotional documents to “write its own history.” These documents connect TBN’s religious legitimacy to its success as a business and claim that the former causes the latter and that the latter is proof of the former. This study uses textual analysis to show that TBN represents itself as a divinely directed organization to earn its targeted viewers’ trust and to help it to remain competitive as a modern media enterprise.