Photo Credit: Voice of America; OAN Network, Verizon
Conservative cable news network One America News was announced to have been dropped by Verizon Fios. In a statement made to TheDailyBeast they said, “Our negotiation with OAN has been a typical, business-as-usual carriage negotiation like those that routinely happen between content distributors and content providers. These negotiations were focused on economics, as they always are, but OAN failed to agree to fair terms.” And while their explanation doesn’t cite politics, we’re sure the billion dollar lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic voting systems isn’t helping or their complete solidarity behind what happened on January 6th and serving as the main propaganda tool behind the 2020 election conspiracy claims.
With now zero major networks carrying OAN, this in turn has caused their number one supporter, former President Trump to become quite irate. He took to his Truth Social platform he created after being banned from Twitter post January 6th to say, “One America News (OAN) is AMAZING, with great ratings and a REALLY loyal following,” he wrote. “Despite it being so good, VERIZON, for purely political reasons, will be terminating OAN at the end of this month. Isn’t this ‘stuff’ supposed to be illegal?” He added, “The good news is that the owners and management of One America News is smart and very wise. They will figure it out!”
Government watchdog group Common Cause’s Media and Democracy Program Director Yosef Getachew said Verizon dropping OAN means they “will be left without a major carrier to spread its often harmful and dangerous disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories. This is a welcome change but long overdue.” He went on to say “We hope those remaining small pay-tv providers and streaming services still carrying OAN will follow suit and deprive the outlet of any platform to spread harmful conspiracy theories that have done real world harm. No company should profit from spreading content that endangers our democracy.”
We’re going to see if this news station survives but given their dabbling into fascist movements like calling The Proud Boys simply a “conservative mens club” despite them essentially serving as the Right’s military arm along with the Oath Keepers, etc which has been discussed before Congress these days, support for their network is quickly going out of style. They even had a network host beg Democrats recently to come together against their censorship to keep them on the air despite bashing them day and night.
