Pat Robertson, conservative evangelist and Christian Coalition founder, dies at 93

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126. Robertson was also responsible for bringing the infamous Mother Angelica to the world, and...

...also somewhat indirectly, the execrable EWTN network for which she was better known. Mother Angelica was "discovered", more or less, by Robertson in the late '70s, when his CBN network began playing her videotaped shows. Robertson eventually saw her as a threat to his Protestant-centered programming, and kicked her off the network. That gave Mother Angelica and her ridiculous band of radtrad nuns the initiative to start their own network (EWTN) in Alabama. EWTN imitated all of the worst aspects of Bible Belt fundamentalism seen on Robertson's CBN, including a complete hermetically-sealed information system with a simulacrum of a news-gathering organization: the original "fake news". Almost everything on EWTN was cribbed directly from CBN, which served as the template for many similar networks over the past several decades.