The future of One America News, which established itself as a powerful voice in conservative media by pushing some of the most outlandish lies about the 2020 election, is in serious doubt as major carriers drop it and defamation lawsuits threaten to exhaust his finances. By the end of this week, cable will have lost its presence in about 20 million homes this year. The latest blow came from Verizon, which will stop carrying OAN on its Fios TV service starting Saturday. That would strip the network of a major revenue stream: the fees it collects from Verizon, which counts about 3.5 million cable subscribers. In April, OAN was pulled from AT&T’s DirecTV, which has about 15 million subscribers. OAN’s audience will be small. The network will soon be available only to a few hundred thousand people who subscribe to smaller cable providers such as Frontier and GCI Liberty, said Scott Robson, senior research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. OAN also sells its programming directly to users through its streaming platforms OAN Live and KlowdTV, but these products likely provide a fraction of the revenue generated by traditional TV providers. Subscribe to The Morning newsletter from The New York Times “I really think this is the death blow for the network,” Robson said. In its statement announcing the end of the OAN deal, Verizon said only that it was “unable to reach an agreement to continue to carry One America News” and made no mention of the public pressure campaigns it faced from activist groups such as Media Matters, which called for cable operators to abandon the network. A company spokesman declined to comment further on Tuesday. DirecTV also did not elaborate on why it was leaving OAN, saying in January that the move was part of a “routine internal review.” On Tuesday, the company addressed the January announcement. While OAN doesn’t have the clout of the much larger Fox News, the top cable news network, fees from its deals with Verizon and AT&T have provided a significant revenue stream — about $36 million a year, according to some estimates. And once it disappears from millions of television sets, OAN will be in a weaker bargaining position with advertisers. fewer potential viewers likely means fewer companies willing to pay that much to promote their products on the network. The story continues All of this comes at a particularly bad time for San Diego-based OAN. The company and the Herring family that backs it are facing defamation lawsuits over the network’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Donald Trump. That coverage featured wild stories about alleged conspiracies to steal votes from Trump. Voting technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion sued OAN for falsely claiming that their machines allowed Trump’s enemies to switch their votes for President Joe Biden. A Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, is also suing the network. Coomer received threats on his life after OAN named him in a report as an alleged associate of antifa, the far-left movement. Two election officials from Georgia sued OAN for what they said was part of an illegal conspiracy to add fraudulent votes to Biden’s totals in the state, which he narrowly won. OAN settled this case in April. The cases are among a series of defamation lawsuits against conservative media outlets and Trump allies pending before judges across the country. Dominion and Smartmatic are also suing Newsmax, one of OAN’s competitors, and Fox News. For OAN, the trial so far has not gone well, as judges have rejected his attempts to have the cases dismissed. In a ruling, a judge concluded that OAN had acted “maliciously and knowingly” in perpetuating lies about Dominion and that its chief White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, had not exercised even the slightest journalistic control. In her report, Rion cited a conservative podcaster and activist, Joe Oltmann, who claimed to have eavesdropped on an antifa conference call before the election, and reported that “antifa-devoured engineers are willing to delete half the voice of America’ and referred to Coomer. . Last year, Charles Herring, president of OAN owner Herring Networks, defended the coverage in remarks to The New York Times, saying the network has a review process with multiple checks to ensure its news coverage meets its standards. company. “Based on our investigations, voter irregularities clearly occurred in the November 2020 election,” he said. “The real question is to what extent.” Started in 2013 by Herring’s father, Robert Herring, a tech entrepreneur, OAN was for years a far-right cable network that carried stories about a Republican effort to impeach President Barack Obama and American Muslims joining the Islamic State group. Washington’s conservative takeover in 2017 breathed new life into it. That year, DirecTV struck a deal to carry the channel and greatly expanded its potential viewership. Trump gushed over its flattering coverage, giving it the praise he usually reserved for Fox News, calling OAN “a great network.” OAN became not only a reliable purveyor of Trump coverage, but also a fierce persecutor of his political opponents. Her willingness to bend the truth and give voice to conspiracy theories on a variety of topics — vaccines, COVID-19, the identity of the Capitol rioters on January 6, 2021 — has gone further than any of her competitors in the Trump media sphere. Trump rewarded the network’s loyalty. In the summer of 2020, unhappy with what he saw as insufficiently positive coverage from Fox News, he urged his followers to watch OAN and Newsmax instead, deeming them “much better!” He did it again after the election, when OAN correspondents were more willing than many Fox reporters to continue to give credence to allegations of voter fraud. More than some of its rivals, OAN clung for months to the idea that the election remained inconclusive. At times, the network acted as if Biden wasn’t the president. The channel did not broadcast live coverage of its inauguration. In a late March 2021 report, one of his correspondents claimed, “There are still serious doubts about who is actually president.” Now OAN is trying to boost its viewership. In recent days, an advertisement on its website offered new subscribers free access to the OAN Live service until October 31. Its hosts have characterized their network’s dispute with Verizon as another attempt by a corporate media establishment to silence conservative voices. One host, Dan Ball, recently implored viewers to call Verizon and demand that it continue OAN service. “Call this number. You want to tell them, “Keep OAN. Keep OAN,” he said. “Verizon is next to try to censor One America News.” © 2022 The New York Times Company
