Salem Media Group

Salem Media Group began in 1974 as a business decision, not a religious calling in the sense that founded the ministries around it. Edward Atsinger III and Stuart Epperson Sr, brothers-in-law who had each been separately acquiring small radio stations, combined their holdings into a single company with a specific commercial thesis: buy struggling stations in major markets and convert them to a Christian teaching and talk format nobody else was fully exploiting at the time.

The company started with stations in North Carolina and California and expanded from there into Boston, San Antonio, New York City, San Francisco, Portland and Los Angeles, converting each new acquisition to the Christian talk format as it came under Salem's ownership. The commitment was serious enough that in 1977 Atsinger and Epperson mortgaged their own homes and sold off their remaining secular stations to fund further Christian-format purchases, a bet that only paid off fully with the 1985 acquisition of KKLA, a powerful Los Angeles market station whose transmitter output dwarfed the small Oxnard station the company had started that market with.

What Atsinger and Epperson were building was never a nonprofit ministry. It was, from its first combined stations in 1974, a company designed to make Christian format radio commercially viable at a scale no denomination-run network had attempted, and the pattern they set, buying stations, converting formats, expanding into new markets, became the template for everything Salem built over the following five decades.

Half a century after Edward Atsinger and Stuart Epperson combined their first stations, Salem Media Group had grown into one of the largest radio station groups in the United States, its owned and operated stations spanning dozens of markets across Christian teaching and talk, conservative news and talk, and contemporary Christian music formats. The company added a national syndication arm, Salem Radio Network, a digital operation running more than one hundred Christian and conservative websites, and a 24 hour cable news channel launched in 2021, none of which existed when the company was still buying and converting individual stations one market at a time.

That scale carries a different set of consequences than a nonprofit ministry faces. Salem is a public company, formerly listed on Nasdaq and delisted in December 2023 for failing exchange requirements before moving to over the counter trading, which means its Christian format stations sit inside a business answerable to shareholders and disclosure requirements rather than to a denominational board or a donor base alone. In May 2024 the company pulled a film and book it had distributed and issued an apology after settling a defamation matter over false claims the material had made about a private individual, the kind of commercial liability event a purely donor-funded ministry does not typically face in the same form.

Salem's own stated mission describes "amplifying truth, faith, and self-governance through media" rather than framing its work in explicitly evangelistic terms, language that reflects what the company actually is: a commercial broadcaster whose stations carry a religious format alongside conservative political talk and contemporary Christian music, built and run as a business from its first combined stations in 1974 onward.