The future of One America News is in serious doubt as major carriers drop it from their lineups and defamation lawsuits threaten to drain it's finances.
The cable network will no longer be present in 20 million homes by the end of this week. OAN will no longer be carried on the Fios television service from Saturday. 3.5 million cable subscribers are the main source of revenue for the network and it will be cut off. AT&T's DirecTV has about 15 million subscribers.
The audience will be small. The network will only be available to a few hundred thousand people who subscribe to smaller cable providers such as Frontier and GCI Liberty. Those products most likely provide a fraction of the revenue generated by traditional TV providers.
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The death blow is for the network.
There was no mention of the public pressure campaigns it faced from Activist groups like Media Matters, which had been calling on cable providers to carry One America News. A company spokesman wouldn't say anything more Tuesday.
In January, the company said it was part of a "routine internal review." The company mentioned the January statement on Tuesday.
OAN does not have the power of Fox News, which is the top-rated cable news network, but the fees from its deals with AT&T and Verizon provided a large amount of income. Advertisers will be less willing to pay as much to promote their products on the network once it's gone from millions of TV sets.
It's a bad time for OAN, which is located in San Diego. The company and the Herring family are being sued for defamation over the network's claims that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.
There were stories about plans to steal votes from Trump. OAN is being sued by two voting technology companies over false claims that their machines enabled Trump's enemies to switch votes. Eric Coomer is an employee of the company. There were death threats against Coomer after OAN named him in a report as an anti-fascist.
The two election workers from Georgia sued OAN for reporting that they were part of an illegal plot to add fraudulent votes to Biden's totals in the state, which he narrowly won. The case was settled in the spring.
There are a number of defamation suits pending before judges across the country. Newsmax and Fox News are being sued by two other companies.
Judges have rejected OAN's attempts to have the cases thrown out. A judge concluded that OAN had acted maliciously and consciously and that its chief White House correspondent had failed to exercise even the most minimal journalistic scrutiny.
In her report, Rion mentioned a conservative activist named Joe Oltmann, who claimed to have eavesdropped on a conference call before the election.
In an interview with The New York Times last year, Charles Herring, the president of OAN's owner, said that the network has a review process with multiple checks in place to make sure news coverage is up to company standards.
The November 2020 election was clearly marked by voter fraud. What is the real question?
OAN was a cable network that ran stories about Republican efforts to impeach President Barack Obama and about American Muslims joining the Islamic State group.
Washington was given a new lease on life by the conservative takeover of the state. The channel was carried by DirecTV and its potential audience was greatly increased. The kind of praise Trump usually reserved for Fox News was lavished on by him.
OAN became a reliable source of coverage of Trump, as well as a tenacious pursuer of his political opponents. Its willingness to bend the truth and give voice to conspiracy theories on a number of topics went further than any of its competitors.
The network received a reward from Trump. He urged his followers to watch OAN and Newsmax in the summer of 2020 because he was dissatisfied with the coverage from Fox. He did it again after the election when OAN's correspondents were willing to lend credibility to allegations of voter fraud.
For a long time, OAN believed that the election was still unresolved. The network acted like Biden wasn't the president. There was no live coverage of his inauguration. There is still serious doubts about who is actually president according to one of its correspondents.
OAN is trying to get people to watch it. New subscribers were offered free access to its OAN Live service through the end of October.
Dan Ball, one of the network's anchors, urged viewers to call the company and demand that they continue to serve OAN. It's the number that you want to call. You want to let them know that you care. He told them to keep OAN. One America News is being tried on byVerizon.
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