The National Rifle Association isn't coming to Dallas this weekend. It's been here a long time.
For years, in a glass-walled, high-rise office just across from Klyde Warren Park in Uptown, the NRA has conducted what might be its most important experiment yet in churning members' emotions, crafting talking points and pushing an agenda of near-absolute opposition to gun restrictions — NRA TV.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, NRA TV is the nonstop answer to any and all threats to gun rights. The message is loud and constant: Nothing less than American freedom is at stake if the Second Amendment is challenged and firearms are regulated.
"WHY AREN'T SCHOOLS SPENDING MORE ON FORTIFYING CLASSROOMS?" a ticker screamed across the bottom of NRA TV a few days after Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 students and faculty members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Above the ticker, anchor Grant Stinchfield faced the camera and wondered why government leaders aren't doing more to secure schools.
"Children are dead — children we should have protected," Stinchfield said. "But the media and its war on guns scared politicians into bowing down — not to the NRA, but to liberal elitists and their politically correct, anti-gun, unicorn-and-rainbows way of thinking."
The station — which streams on NRATV.com and platforms including Apple TV, Roku and Amazon TV — has changed the NRA's public relations playbook. Once largely silent in the wake of mass shootings, particularly those where students were targeted, the NRA now uses NRA TV to present a counternarrative to calls for gun regulation and to attack those who see things differently.
It has been a game-changer, keeping the NRA on the offensive even as calls for gun restrictions grow louder with each mass killing. To hear the hosts tell it, this is the only place with the truth; the mainstream media conspire with the tyrannical socialist left. Here, proposals to clamp down on guns — mandates to lock them, limits on firepower — are derided as ways to hurt the law-abiding and embolden criminals.
To Stinchfield, this is how the NRA needs to get its message out — by raising the volume.
"We've just had to get louder as the voices of dissent get louder," he said.
There are signs that the rhetoric, amid massive student demonstrations for gun control, is firing up the NRA's members. In March, the NRA's Political Victory Fund broke its 15-year monthly fundraising record, collecting $2.4 million. Most of the donations came from donors who gave less than $200 each, Federal Election Commission records show.
High-pitched and hyper-partisan
The format of NRA TV will be familiar to anyone who watches partisan cable news.
The channel has three main anchors, all based in Dallas: Stinchfield, 49, a former KXAS-TV (NBC5) reporter who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2012; Collins Idehen, 34, a lawyer who amassed a YouTube following for his pro-gun videos under the moniker "Colion Noir"; and Dana Loesch, 39, a former tea party activist and Breitbart editor.
A mother who lives in Southlake, Loesch emerged as the public face of the gun-rights group last year, after an NRA ad featuring her went viral. The ad played ominous music and showed images of riots, as she said liberals "scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia, to smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding — until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness."
NRA TV declined to grant access to its studios, but Idehen and Stinchfield did speak to The Dallas Morning News. Loesch didn't respond to interview requests.
The channel has a variety of shows, but about half the content is commentary on the day's news, often featuring the hosts making appearances on one another's shows, agreeing with one another's perspectives, exchanging softball questions and ranting about the two groups they present as the enemies of gun rights: the mainstream news media and liberals. The anchors regularly bring on guests from right-wing think tanks. The commentary can be high-pitched and hyper-partisan. The group's ads carry the same alarmist rhetoric: "JOIN NRA OR LOSE YOUR GUNS" and "HELP FIGHT THE SOCIALIST WAVE."
The media politicizes these mass shootings to push an agenda," Stinchfield told his viewers recently. "They weaponize America's sadness to use it against us all, to rip apart our freedoms. They know no new law would have stopped this lunatic from getting his gun and using it, but they don't care. They only care about disarming law-abiding Americans."
Launched in 2016, NRA TV produces a few dozen original programs, including Patriot Profiles, a series of police and military stories; Armed and Fabulous, which follows gun-toting women; and Under Wild Skies, which profiles big-game hunters shooting everything from buffaloes to elephants. The network has sponsorship agreements with gun brands such as Mossberg, Smith & Wesson, Sig Sauer and Ruger, and their products are regularly featured.
Ads and marketing are another major feature — often with the same three anchors pitching gun products, as well as energy drinks and NRA classes.
In fact, advertising is how NRA TV got its start. In 2002, Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act banning political broadcast ads in the weeks before an election.
The NRA, in coordination with its longtime ad agency Ackerman McQueen, decided that the best way to circumvent the political advertising rules was to go into the news business. And so in 2004, the precursor to NRA TV was born.
"If political free speech is restricted to news media, why not go deeper into the news business yourself?" says the website of Ackerman McQueen, which is based in Oklahoma but has a large office in Dallas.
In recent years, the NRA has invested tens of millions of dollars per year in member support programs, which include NRA TV, according to public tax filings.
It's unclear how many people tune in. Stinchfield said he doesn't know. On social media, some of his videos have drawn millions; others a couple thousand. Web traffic to NRATV.com has risen steeply since January, going from an estimated 55,000 page visits to 580,000 in March, according to SimilarWeb.com, a digital analytics company. The growth is impressive, but the numbers are still far behind the mainstream media NRA TV frequently targets. The New York Times — often cited on NRA TV as part of the mainstream media problem — logged 382 million visits in March. NRA TV has 9.5 million views on YouTube and 1.3 million followers on Facebook.
NRA TV anchors point, however, to a reach beyond the numbers of direct viewers. Their words are often picked up and echoed by dozens, even hundreds, of media outlets. And Stinchfield said power brokers, especially Republicans in Congress, keep the channel on in their offices to monitor the NRA's take on events.
"I can effect more change doing what I'm doing now than I could have as a congressman in Washington, getting lost in that cesspool," Stinchfield said. "We hold Republican lawmakers accountable. Any little misstep when it comes to getting squishy on gun rights — if I come out hammering on behalf of our membership, time and time again, they get back in line."
If Stinchfield wants, he said, he can spur scores of his viewers to pressure their lawmakers into voting a certain way. For example, Stinchfield said, the outlet was instrumental in getting concealed carry reciprocity to pass in the House. The measure, opposed by many police groups, would allow concealed handgun license holders to carry a gun outside their home state. He said rhetoric developed in Dallas is often repeated at the upper echelons of government.