Bryan Hardin Thrift's Conservative Bias is a semi-biography of Jesse Helms, describing the former North Carolina senator's career as a political commentator and vice president of Raleigh's WRAL-TV before his 1972 election to national office. Thrift cleverly uses “pious incitement” – a phrase the Raleigh News and Observer invented in 1958 to criticize Helms – not only to summarize Helms's life and work, but also to describe an important aspect of conservative electoral strategy during and after the 1960s. “Pious incitement” involved Helms's savvy use of television to manipulate messages about race, turning overt racism into oblique racism, and simultaneously promoting conservative, market-based alternatives to New Deal federal programs. Thus Helms popularized small-government conservatism among a population historically friendly to big-government liberalism and contributed to the South's electoral realignment.

Thrift begins in the 1950s with Helms as a frustrated “movement conservative” in eastern North Carolina, a region full of Democrats loyal to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal liberalism but furious about national Democrats' increasing support for civil rights activism and legislation. His second chapter describes Helms's early years as a television executive and editorialist at WRAL, where he manipulated his audience's racial prejudices to turn them against federal programs they had long supported. As the Kennedy and Johnson administrations increasingly supported civil rights activists and moved to combat economic inequality, Helms suggested that government benefits were going to undeserving people, replacing “an explicitly racist language” with “a moralistic discourse” and substituting “a moral community for a racial one” (59). In his third chapter, Thrift describes how Helms skillfully flouted the FCC's “Fairness Doctrine” and defended his station against charges of bias. In chapters 4 and 5, Helms takes advantage first of the national backlash against urban violence and the escalating Vietnam War, and then of the 1970s “culture wars,” continuing to rely on his strategy of pious incitement. In his sixth chapter and Epilogue, Thrift describes Helms's collusion with and influence on recognized denizens of the New Right like Richard Viguerie and Ronald Reagan.

The book's style is plain, elegant, and accessible to nonacademic readers, who will enjoy Thrift's compelling description of how Jesse Helms refined aspects of right-wing media so familiar today, particularly the Fox News Channel's conceit of airing “fair and balanced” material. Helms, Thrift illustrates, believed that conservative bias on television was permissible and desirable, because – at least during the 1960s – liberal bias was otherwise universal. He promoted a now familiar “unbending, relentless right-wing conservatism that recognized no moderates and preferred stalemate to governing” (193).

For the scholarly community, Thrift's book is a valuable interpretation of southern backlash politics, augmenting work by Joseph Crespino, Matthew Lassiter, Kevin Kruse, and others who have questioned the uniqueness of the South's conservative political culture. As Thrift succinctly and sensibly argues, “without [southern] backlash and Republican willingness to exploit it, realignment would not have happened” (3). In most of Thrift's narrative Helms seems a savvy business conservative who used “pious incitement” to realign southern electoral politics along lines amenable to the anti-New Deal wing of the Republican Party. Yet this portrait is not entirely clear. In chapter 6 and the Epilogue, Helms seems less cynical and more a true believer in the “pious incitement” he perfected. Thrift admits that the historical record does not reveal how the young Helms developed his maverick conservative ideology in the “solid” Democratic South (17). Clues are littered throughout the book, however, particularly in chapter 6, where Thrift summarizes what many of his sources have indicated: much of Helms's “pious incitement” consisted of anticommunist conspiracy theory that, even in 1971, he seemed to accept as fact. Perhaps the “conspiracy-laden atmosphere of [1950s] conservative Washington,” which the young Helms imbibed from Willis Smith and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (20), was the true origin of “pious incitement.”

Overall, Thrift's book is a concise, clear, and clever narrative of how Jesse Helms used new media to change the way voters saw the world in which they lived, and to see that they rewarded him and his conservative allies at the ballot box.