“Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” — John Donne
It looks like OAN is not going to go gently into that dark night. It was anticipated that the network would be out of business the end of this month after Direct TV made an announcement in January that it was dropping them. Owner Robert Herring, Sr. took the news as seriously as a heart attack, begging viewers to help find OAN a new carrier and host Dan Ball asked fans to “find dirt” on William Kennard who had recently taken over AT&T, for whatever good that was going to do. Long story short, viewers didn’t magically conjure up a carrier nor did anybody find anything salacious about Kennard with which to blackmail him.
Nevertheless, OAN remained determined to stay in business and here’s where the picture gets interesting, quite apart from a ranting Trump or crazed anchors with dreams of extortion dancing in their heads. Stay with me now. Reuter’s ran a piece yesterday announcing that AT&T and OAN were going to maintain their advertising deal even after Direct TV drops the network the end of the month. Whut? Precisely.
WASHINGTON, March 14 (Reuters) – AT&T’s financial relationship with One America News is deeper than previously known and will continue even after DirecTV drops the far-right network from its satellite service next month, a new court filing shows.
The court filing, made as part of a lawsuit OAN filed against AT&T and DirecTV last week, reveals an exclusive contract for an AT&T subsidiary to sell commercials for OAN.
AT&T owns 70% of DirecTV, which announced in January it would drop OAN, a network known for promoting false 2020 election reports. The move came three months after Reuters revealed that AT&T played a pivotal role in creating OAN and has paid tens of millions of dollars to carry the network on DirecTV.
OAN’s lawsuit, which seeks $1 billion in damages, alleges that the removal of the network from the satellite service was politically inspired and “could be devastating” financially. Court records show that about 90% of OAN’s revenue is generated from its AT&T/DirecTV deals.
So you clearly see, this is not just a matter of Direct TV saying we’re not interested anymore and we’re choosing to walk away. This is getting hairy and it got hairy last year when it was revealed that OAN very likely would never have come to be but for AT&T. The details weren’t known, but Herring certainly had nothing bad to say about AT&T when they were buttering his bread. That makes sense because now it appears that they not only buttered the bread, they toasted it and put jelly on it, too.
After the Reuters report ran last year, AT&T issued a statement that said it “has never had a financial interest in OAN’s success.”
But the new lawsuit alleges that in addition to helping to create and distribute OAN, AT&T entered into the advertising deal with the network in 2019.
Under that deal, an AT&T subsidiary called Xandr is OAN’s sole advertising vendor and earns a commission on commercials aired by the network, the lawsuit alleges. A pending sale of Xandr to Microsoft will not include the portion of the company that sells commercials for DirecTV or OAN.
After DirecTV drops OAN, said a person familiar with the contract, the AT&T subsidiary will continue to serve as the advertising representative for OAN on other platforms, such as regional cable companies and cable and internet provider Verizon FIOS.
The pact to sell commercials is separate from the deal to air OAN on DirecTV, and does not expire until 2024.
Now this is probably weird enough for you, right, but it gets weirder still. Time Warner pulled the plug on OAN, at least according to Donald Trump, who is livid about it. Take a look at that first.
Now take a look at this.
This is a Trump statement, but… Time Warner hasn’t owned cable systems since Spectrum bought what used to be Time Warner Cable. There isn’t even such a thing as Time Warner anymore, it became WarnerMedia when AT&T bought it. All of this happened while Trump was president! https://t.co/66M7fz6l1e
— Stephen Silver (@StephenSilver) March 14, 2022
1990: Time and Warner merge
1995: Time Warner buys Turner
2000: AOL buys Time Warner
2009: Time Warner Cable spin
2009: AOL spin
2014: Time spin
2016: AT&T buys Time Warner
2021: WarnerMedia merged with Discovery https://t.co/t4XZK4R3UB— Alex Sherman (@sherman4949) May 18, 2021
— Stephen Silver (@StephenSilver) March 15, 2022
So following the trail of breadcrumbs, I found out that Democratic Underground had a story on Time Warner canceling OAN.
Time Warner has announced they are canceling OAN, a network of wall-to-wall fearmongering, false narratives, and conspiracy theories. Or, as Trump calls them, "a wonderful network."
This should about do it for OAN. Good riddance if so.— Duty To Warn ? (@duty2warn) March 14, 2022
Duty to War is “A group of mental health professionals warning now about Trumpism.” I have no idea where they got the story.
And the other connection I can’t find, unsurprisingly, is where Trump got the story. He’s all in a tither about it, but it appears to be a nothing burger.
As to OAN, Herring is taking everything very personally. He said in his suit filed last week that AT&T’s decision to drop OAN from DirecTV is “part and parcel of a larger, coordinated, extremely well-financed political scheme to take down Herring and unlawfully destroy its [sic] ability to operate in the media business.”
What appears to be Herring’s bottom line is that he thought that the DirectTV-OAN deal would go through 2024 when the pact to sell commercials expires.
Who knows where the lawsuit will go, but for right now, it appears that March 31, 2022 is still OAN’s last day on DirectTV. And if anybody finds out the answer to the Time Warner/Trump freak out mystery, please let us know here, any time of the day or night.
Trump may have started out in reality TV but he has since moved to unreality TV and this has been an example of that. The man does nothing but talk out his ass. He doesn’t know what’s what and I daresay he doesn’t really care. He’s probably happy to just have an opportunity to vent, whether there’s anything to vent about or not.
Why is it always like this? The G.Q.P. are all “let capitalism decide, let businesses do business without interference” until businesses actually let capitalism decide and make business decisions accordingly.
morons
They are like that with everything. Like ‘my constitutional rights shouldn’t stop at your political ideology.’ Unless you’re a pregnant woman. Or ‘when it comes to contagious and for some, deadly diseases spreading rampantly thru a population, schools need to stay out of family matters.’ Unless it’s a child’s personal sexual or gender identity that has no bearing on anyone else’s life, then children and family services should investigate and schools need to call parents, police, etc etc. Trump is outraged that a private business actually enforced its own policies but but his business is absolutely, unquestionably entitled to do the very same thing. The levels of hypocrisy and self centeredness are staggeringly high with these fragile, white,inadequate, snowflake projectionists.