Salem Media Group co-founder with Piedmont ties who transformed Christian radio is dead at 86

The Salem Media Group co-founder Stuart Epperson Sr. has died. He was from Ararat, Virginia, and later lived in Winston-Salem. He was 86 years old. 

Epperson’s love of radio began early and remained with him throughout his long life. As a 10-year-old he read Bible verses from the radio station his brother constructed in the family farmhouse. In his 30s, Epperson purchased an AM station of his own, and then he had a brief stint in politics, running unsuccessfully as the Republican nominee for the 5th Congressional District of North Carolina in 1984 and 1986. In 1993, Epperson and his brother-in-law launched Salem Radio Network.

Katie Thornton is a freelance journalist and the host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast series The Divided Dial with WNYC's On the Media. She says along the way, Salem Media Group transformed Christian radio. 

"Salem was among the relatively few early Christian broadcasters who decided to go with a network model," says Thornton. "They kind of followed in the model of say a Pat Robertson who was doing a TV network at the time. And they started to buy up all of these stations in cities across the country. You know, they wanted to go where — as they saw it — there were the most souls to save. "  

They also expanded to include news talk radio, and soon billed themselves as the largest Christian, conservative multimedia company in the country, reaching millions of listeners each week on roughly 100 stations. She says from the early days, Salem Media Group’s messages were socially conservative in line with what the co-founders saw as their version of a biblical worldview.

"But over time the messages became more explicitly political," she says. "This was happening in the same time that the religious right was growing nationwide. And in the 1990s, they formerly made this shift into conservative political talk radio."

In 2005, Epperson was named one of Time Magazine’s most influential evangelicals in America — involved in many conservative groups focused on preserving Judeo Christian values through public policy. The network’s growth paralleled that of the Religious Right. Today its programs, syndicated by more than 3,000 radio stations, amplify discredited information about the 2020 election, COVID-19 and more. Hosts include former Trump White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, Fox News host Mark Levin, and Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk. 

According to his son Stu Epperson Jr.’s Twitter post, Salem Media Group co-founder Stuart Epperson died peacefully in his sleep Monday morning.