Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is taking some time away from causing suffering on trans children and allegedly defrauding investors to warn DirecTV: bring back your Trumpiest channel. In order to pursue the Republican grievance of the week, Paxton has joined with his GOP colleagues in five other states to pen a letter warning of consequences if the contract is not terminated. In January, the AT&T-owned satellite TV provider announced its intent to drop OAN from its roster at the end of the current contract, effectively cutting the Donald Trump-obsessed channel off from its only major distributor and sole reliable source of revenue. As part of the settlement agreement, DirecTV had to carry the network. It's not surprising that DirecTV decided to do some cord-cutting of its own, since OAN's content consisted of fascist calls to violence, conspiracy theories, and sheer cringe. Terrible consequences. Dire ones would shake the corporate giants. They will be really mad and something will be boycotting. In a letter to Bill Morrow, the AGs wrote that DirecTV's decision was highly troubling and disappointing, and that it wasmasking what was obviously viewpoint discrimination. The AGs argued that the decision to drop OAN was based on a routine internal review that was demanded by powerful leftwing voices.
Obviously, these inflammatory accusations against OAN are ridiculous. And even if they weren’t—that is, even if OAN were more accurately construed as simply representing a different perspective from the legacy media’s liberal orthodoxies—that’s precisely what your majority owner AT&T wanted when it signed OAN: viewpoint diversity. Those values appear to have changed dramatically in late 2020 when the legacy media decided Joe Biden was the next president.
Why are six Republican AGs spending their time writing a letter? The letter is curiously devoid of any promise of official retribution despite the fact that Paxton regularly threatens to investigate any company or person that happens to be the target of Fox News outrage. Maybe there will be a boycott of AT&T by Trump supporters.
Your failure to do so will not only cause you to lose millions of dollars in business, but also drive many millions of Americans to simply cancel your services outright, as President Trump and other leading figures have already called for.
There is no legal basis for the Republican attorneys general to issue a credible threat.
There is no indication that Dan Ball's pleas for viewers to dig up blackmail material from AT&T will have any more impact than the meaningless letter from Paxton. Maybe they'll convince a few guys wearing sunglasses indoors to smash their AT&T cable boxes, but that would require them to miss a few football games, so probably not.
When he isn't writing letters to satellite TV providers, he spends his time deputizing Texas child protective services to intimidate the families of trans children who receive treatment for gender dysphoria, trying to ban abortion, and being investigated by the FBI for allegedly abusing his office. He was first arrested for securities fraud in 2015.
We will update if we hear back on the story.
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