Reuters has done a two-part story entitled “Trump TV: The AT&T connection.” In a sense, this feels like it is coming out of left field, but it does make sense. There are only so many big media and telecommunications outlets and they’re all related. It’s very much like in the Bible, where Abraham begat Jacob and Jacob begat Joseph, all of that. AT&T doesn’t just do mobile phones and WiFi, they own Warner Media. And Warner Media owns CNN and HBO. And so it goes.

AT&T also acquired DirecTV in 2015

and in August spun off the satellite service, retaining a 70% share in the new, independently managed company. AT&T’s total U.S. television subscriber base, including satellite and streaming services, fell from 26 million in 2015 to 15.4 million as of August.

A Reuters review of court records shows the role AT&T played in creating and funding OAN, a network that continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives.

“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.

Herring has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network’s value “would be zero.”

We are certainly relieved to know that Direct TV is bolstering up the cesspool of disinformation that OAN is. I’m sure we’ll all sleep better tonight. Although, in all truth, unless you’re incredibly naive, this is how things work in corporate America.

The bottom line is all that matters and if there are small speedbumps along the way, such as democracy and our way of life getting destroyed, nobody cares about that. And nobody is going to care until the day arrives that somebody stands up at a meeting of the Board of Directors of Warner Media and demonstrates effectively how destroying democracy is bad for business. Maybe we should just drop everything and work on that, this may be the one and only card we’ve got to play. Or, our high card, at the very least.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said the births of Fox News and OAN share common threads: money and opportunity. She noted that the late Republican operative Roger Ailes had the foresight in the 1990s to recommend that Fox create a conservative news network.

“If somebody recognizes there’s a market for something and there’s a lot of money attached to that market, you get a news outlet,” Jamieson said. “So this is AT&T playing the Roger Ailes role.”

Greer, the AT&T spokesman, called that comparison “a ridiculous claim,” noting that other distributors also carry OAN.

A boost from the insurrection

America’s post-election turmoil, punctuated by the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, continues to roil the country. Dozens of election administrators in battleground states Trump lost have received a barrage of death threats,Reuters has reported. A Reuters poll in May showed that a quarter of Americans – and 53% of Republicans – wrongly believe Trump won the 2020 election.

OAN caters to this audience. Trump’s loss was OAN’s gain, social media data show.

The network’s online audience soared in November, after conservative mainstay and OAN competitor Fox News affirmed Joe Biden’s victory. Trump and his camp blasted Fox. A record 767,000 people installed the OAN app that month, nine times as many as in October, according to data firm Sensor Tower. In January, Trump supporters, including at least one carrying an OAN flag, stormed the U.S. Capitol. That month, app installs spiked again to 517,000.

Here’s the bottom line: if there is a propaganda channel or channels in this country, it is because people with a lot of money see a way to make even more money. The fact that what they’re putting on the airwaves is poisonous doesn’t matter. Not in this game of cards.

OAN says it is the fourth-rated news network, behind Fox, CNN and MSNBC, and ahead of CNBC, the BBC and Newsmax, but has not provided figures to back this up. (Each of these networks, including One America News, pays Reuters fees to publish the news service’s stories, videos and/or pictures.)

Even so, the number of viewers OAN reaches may be less important than the kind of observers it attracts and galvanizes, said John Watson, an American University journalism professor specializing in ethics and media law.

“If you have 12 Americans being fed a diet of untruth, that’s 12 too many – and here, it’s literally millions,” Watson said of the OAN audience. “When you have that sort of poisonous influence on mass media, it’s a problem; because elections in the United States tend to be so close, a few percentage points here or there can really make a difference.”

And people go nuts when they hear lies. Today, we call that the New Normal.

At least one self-described regular OAN viewer recently sent a threatening note to an election official. In August, Sheila Garcia of Riverside County, California, sent Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold a scathing message. Biden beat Trump in Colorado, and Garcia accused Griswold, the state’s top election official, of treason – warning her that punishments for that crime are hanging and legal injection. “Within several months you will have to decide between the two,” Garcia wrote.

In an interview, Griswold said she considered threats like Garcia’s message a credible threat on her life. That threat and dozens of others caused her to seek extra security measures, she said.

And it goes without saying that on January 6 all the stops were pulled out.

On January 6, after Trump supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol, an OAN news director cautioned staff via email, “Please DO NOT say ‘Trump Supporters Storm Capitol …’ Simply call them demonstrators or protestors … DO NOT CALL IT A RIOT!!!”

A day later, Herring suggested the riot might be a false-flag operation by the leftwing Antifa movement. “We want to report all the things Antifa did yesterday. I don’t think it was Trump people but lets investigate,” he emailed OAN producers. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says there is no evidence of Antifa involvement in the riot. All but a handful of the some 600 suspects charged so far have been rightwing Trump backers.

The next day, Herring tweeted: “If anyone thinks we will throw the best President America has had, in my 79 years, under the bus, you are wrong. We will continue to give him honest coverage.”

This is what we’re dealing with in 2021.

This story is very lengthy and provides a lot of historical background. If you can read only one piece today in its entirety, this is the one. Or bookmark it for later.

Once again and always, follow the money is the best advice.

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8 COMMENTS

  1. And this is why we have anti-trust laws. Granted that the GQP doesn’t believe in using them, they should have been used in the past as well as needing to be used now, to break up the megacorps that own so effing much now.

  2. I’m suddenly more glad than before that AT&T’s plans for HBO Max failed so terribly. In a related vein, one-time Marvel chairman/Trumper/racist, sexist POS Ike Perlmutter got caught with two others attempting to profit off veterans’ data purloined from the VA on Trump’s watch.

  3. Abraham begat Issac. Issac begat Jacob. I wish you people would either A) do some VERY basic research before you decide to take on our book or B) leave Torah out of it. It’s bad enough the effing x-tians are busy mis-quoting, misinterpreting, etc. Torah, we don’t need you doing it as well.

    • I actually googled it to make sure and that’s what it told me. Sorry. No insult was meant. I was endeavoring to show how basic the relationships were between these media outlets and that was my metaphor. I beg your pardon if you were offended.

    • Take a chill pill, Spike. So, Ursula made a mistake. Who effin’ cares?

      And she didn’t have to even deal with “Torah” as that also happens to be a narrative from the Christian Bible’s Old Testament (Ibrahim, Ishaaq, Yaqub and Yusuf are all important figures in the Quran as well).

      And, since you were so rude, you misspelled “misquoting” (it’s NOT hyphenated except as the final word of a typewritten or typeset line and is not the final word of a paragraph). We already have a bunch of right-wing morons who can’t spell; we don’t need you doing it as well.

  4. I worked for AT&T before it went ape shit with all these big money grab projects, sticking their fingers into the just frosted cake, making a mess of everything …

    The board of directors were allowed way too much power without the old school of let’s examine how this can effect our customer’s days … the almighty dollar signs welded into the younger people’s eyes has contaminated ALL businesses … quick decisions/misguided use of secure funds, just because, like government, works with large sums of money can distort the value of certain projects, I’m very sad these buy-ins and the following messes that have happened were allowed by the current management …

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