It accompanied the contemporaneous explosion of the popularity of talk radio, practically all of which was dedicated to propagating conservative political positions, on numerous issues in the United States during the 1990s.
Weyrich had long believed that the mainstream news and entertainment media exhibited a liberal bias, opposed structurally, as well as in terms of content, to what figures in the conservative movement defined as traditional American culture and government.
For instance, under the management of Weyrich, NET was involved in discussing – on programs entitled American on Track and The New Electric Railway Journal (affiliated with a print magazine of the same name) – public and mass transit issues, including local rail and interstate mass transit, and the deleterious effects of automotive-oriented planning on the American environment, economy, and urban quality of life.
It also began news reports and updates (akin to the likes of CNN, albeit keeping its ideological principles at the forefront), and a full-fledged investigative journalism program.
Regarding health care, the crew could cover the town hall meeting sponsored by Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and broadcast the highlights nationally", the memo suggested.
Finally, NET could sponsor public opinion surveys in key congressional districts on the health care issue and broadcast the results," the memo stated.
"Philip Morris could increase the impact of NET's coverage by assisting the network in getting additional cable companies to carry their broadcasts", the memo stated.
In a proposal sent to potential sponsors, NET boasted that in its first nine months, the network had "confirmed the validity of its motivating premise: that public affairs broadcasting based upon solid American principles and values has appeal beyond the hearty but thin ranks of policy wonks by making discussion of public affairs exciting and compelling, by igniting viewers' passions, by bringing elected officials onto live programs to be grilled by caller [sic] around the country, and by hosting programs not with TV personalities but with veteran Washington hands familiar with how the nation's capital works.
This was in keeping with the popularity of mainstream political programs such as CNN's Crossfire and PBS' The McLaughlin Group, both of which featured debate-style arguing, as well as a close ally of Weyrich in paleoconservative circles, Pat Buchanan.
In a decision he later came to regret bitterly, Weyrich, under pressure from the associate broadcasters, turned over the day-to-day operation of the channel to Robert Sutton, an industry veteran who had been successful with other startups.
However, Sutton came from the ranks of mainstream media and refused to agree with Weyrich and others' ideological analysis that the television industry was failing to meet the demands of conservative and traditionalist viewers.
With Weyrich gone, under Sutton, the channel abandoned its conservative identity, marketing itself merely as a non-ideological forum for the public to make its views known to policymakers, akin to the call-in programs on C-SPAN.
With much of its original viewership alienated, and also with the rise of Fox News Channel as a popular and far-better-funded source of conservative opinion on cable television, financial support under Sutton collapsed, and Dish Network dropped it.
Even without the financial and administrative issues that led to its demise, the future viability of NET would likely have been poor in any case, due to its orientation toward then-minority elements within conservatism such as right-wing populism, hard-core libertarianism, isolationist foreign policy, protectionist economics, and borderline anti-Semitism and racism.
Instead, Fox News focused on then-mainstream issues, reflecting fusionist general ideology, neoliberal economics (not referring to political liberalism per se), and neoconservative foreign policy, a consensus that marked the Republican Party's governing philosophy at that time.
Ironically, in response to the accession of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency in 2017, and his celebrity among Republican voters, as well as intellectual and institutional leaders of the American political Right, Fox News began to incorporate paleoconservative, and even alt-right, perspectives.
This eventually became the network's primary vantage point by the late 2010s, in both its reporting and talk programming, perhaps vindicating, posthumously, Weyrich's original vision for NET.