"I'll bet in the '50s and '60s, MSM types probably tried to paint Billy as some dangerous, extreme-fundamentalist whacko.'
No, not really. Incredible as it may seem, the media has not always been overwhelmingly leftist. The fifties especially were Joe McCarthy's era.
The 50s were before my time, and the 60s for me were spent learning to walk, talk and read, so I'll take your word for that. However, I remember the media being pretty vicious toward Billy Graham in the 80s and the 90s. In a way, he flew a little under the radar, because he avoided personal scandals that engulfed the likes of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker. But every now and then the media would take notice of him, and they were never kind when they did.