As of April 5, DirecTV has removed One America News Network from its TV subscription packages.
In January, DirecTV announced that it would not renew its contract with the far-right conspiracy theory network. Although OAN provided years of virulent bigotry and right-wing misinformation, including one reporter’s on- and off-screen attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the announcement came after a massive public backlash to a Reuters report which revealed that DirecTV’s owner, AT&T, played a critical role in creating OAN and supplied 90% of its income.
Once news broke of its DirecTV contract expiration, OAN filed a breach of contract lawsuit against AT&T and briefly solicited viewers for “dirt” on AT&T’s board chair. Meanwhile, OAN programming has gotten worse since January, as the network doubled down on old staples like anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election, as well as irresponsible coverage of new topics like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The OAN line on COVID-19 vaccines, as delivered by correspondent Pearson Sharp, is that the vaccines are “turning into DNA” to become “part of your body’s genetic code,” meaning that “there’s a good chance they could … kill you.” None of this is true, but in February, Sharp took these abject lies about vaccine mortality in a genocidal direction, telling OAN viewers that the survival of the United States depended on COVID-19 vaccines killing liberals. Sharp also appeared on Infowars, where he hypothesized that COVID-19 restrictions could spark a justified revolution.
Though she was not OAN’s only misinformer about the 2020 election, former host Christina Bobb became the network’s face of its attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. She fought for, reported on, and fundraised for the Arizona “audit,” and before she left OAN in March to work for former President Donald Trump, Bobb had begun a new phase of her pressure campaign against state-level Republicans to begin new “audits.”
OAN also attached its brand of unhinged conspiracy theories to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Multiple OAN figures have suggested or stated that the Russian attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, was what Sharp called a “false flag operation” connected to billionaire George Soros.
But few OAN personalities took as much of an interest in spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine as prime-time host Dan Ball, who repeatedly spread Russian government propaganda about nonexistent “biochemical weapons plants” in Ukraine, and seems to fervently believe that the war somehow involves President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and the 2020 Trump campaign’s old, desperate allegations against Biden and a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. In one segment about Ukraine, Ball even agreed with a guest that the U.S. military should invade and occupy northern Mexico because of immigration.
OAN also spent the past few weeks directing viewers’ ire toward Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. Like much of right-wing media, OAN is enthralled by the false narrative that Jackson “lets pedos out of jail early,” according to Ball, who also called the accomplished jurist “scum” based on this smear. OAN programming has called Jackson part of “the pedophilia problem that is currently happening in the left,” an unmistakable reference to QAnon lies (previously seen during the pre-QAnon Pizzagate era) that liberal elites participate in the systematic sexual exploitation of children.
In what may be OAN's waning days, as DirecTV essentially replaced it with Fox Nation and some of its more visible “talent” have fled the sinking ship, OAN launched its own streaming service in an attempt to stay alive. While subscriber numbers are not publicly known, it seems unlikely that “OANN Live” will make up for the financial loss of OAN’s DirecTV contract.
More importantly, OAN’s conduct since losing DirecTV -- suing its former carrier, spreading Russian propaganda, convincing viewers that not only will vaccines kill people but some of them have to die, to say nothing of its shockingly hateful anti-LGBTQ content -- should make it clear to any TV provider that this litigious, conspiratorial disaster of a channel is simply not worth the trouble.
Chanel Rion, One America News Network’s chief White House correspondent, took money last fall from Republicans to speak at a fundraising event in Illinois. The financial payment to Rion is yet another example of how OAN operates as a propaganda outlet.
One of OAN’s main correspondents is Rion, a discreditedconspiracytheorist and Trump supporter who has worked for the network since 2019. She has used her platform to push lies about the 2020 election supposedly being stolen, which has led to her beingsued for defamation. Rion is also the Chief Marketing Officer for Voices & Votes, a nonprofit organization headed by OAN colleague Christina Bobb that wants to fraudulently “audit” the 2020 election that was won by President Joe Biden. OAN has frequently promoted Voices & Votes.
Rion was a keynote speaker for a September 8, 2021, fundraiser for the Kane County Republican Central Committee in Illinois. The Republican organization paid Rion $2,000 for “Fund raising - entertainment” that day, according to a document filed with the Illinois State Board of Elections. Right-wing commentator Stephen Moore, who also spoke at the event, also received $2,000.
DirecTV, OAN’s largest cable carrier, recentlydecided to drop the channel from its lineup in April. Verizon Fios TV will then become OAN’s largest carrier.
It’s been over a year since President Joe Biden took office — but damaging information continues to emerge about the many illegitimate efforts mounted by former President Donald Trump and his campaign to nullify the results of the 2020 election.
The latest wave of stories stems from the involvement of top campaign figures, including Trump’s then-attorney Rudy Giuliani, in submitting fake slates of “alternate” Electoral College votes for Trump from multiple swing states that Biden had won. Another figure involved in this effort to undermine Biden’s election, it turns out, was Christina Bobb from the pro-Trump channel One America News.
The extent of Bobb’s involvement demonstrates the ways in which the
endangered far-right outlet functions as a propaganda machine spreading an alternate reality about the 2020 election, which Bobb has helped take the lead in performing.
Furthermore, a former Trump campaign official has
told CNN that Bobb had worked with Giuliani on the fake electors: “They were all working together. Rudy, John Eastman, and Christina Bobb, in tandem, to create this coverage for OAN, to advance the Big Lie.” (Eastman is the lawyer who drafted a memo calling for then-Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally refuse to count Biden’s electoral votes.)
Giuliani has also said under oath
in a civil deposition that the campaign “brought Christina on and she took over a lot of Michigan” and “eventually got involved in Georgia,” Arizona, and Nevada as part of the campaign’s work to overturn the election results in those states. “She came over to the campaign and she offered to help us,” Giuliani also explained, and that she had “gathered a lot of information” as a reporter.
Bobb’s legal work with the campaign raised some obvious red flags about
how journalism is supposed to work. For example, Bobb sent an email to Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann in December 2020 about supposed election fraud — specifically saying that she was acting on Giuliani’s behalf — and since then has interviewed Fann on the air about continued efforts to investigate the election.
How the Trump campaign created its own fake Electoral College votes
On
December 14, 2020, the Electoral College delegates from across the country gathered to cast votes in their respective states, depending on whether Biden or Trump had won in each of them. The Trump campaign, however, arranged in a number of states for the people who had previously been candidates for the Electoral College in the November elections to gather and fill out supposed electoral votes for Trump — even though Biden had actually won those states. (In a few cases, though, there were original elector candidates who did not participate in this illegitimate activity, and were instead replaced by backup candidates.)
The maneuver was announced that morning on
Fox & Friends, by Trump adviser Stephen Miller: “This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open. That means that if we win these cases in the courts, that we can direct that the alternate slate of electors be certified. The state legislatures in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, can do the same, and likewise Congress has the opportunity as well to do the right thing.”
Miller thus conflated some very separate avenues for challenging the election results, with regular court challenges on the one hand, versus the Trump campaign’s maneuvers to have
state legislatures simply throw out their states’ certified popular votes from November, which he characterized as “doing the right thing.” And somehow, the existence of these supposed “alternate” electors was supposed to provide a basis for doing so.
By this point, however, Trump’s
legal challenges to the election had failed literally dozens of times, and even in cases heard by judges Trump himself had appointed to the bench. Trump had also failed to persuade Republican-majority state legislatures to attempt to file separate slates of electors, overriding the state election results based on a propaganda campaign claiming there had been mass voter fraud. So then, his campaign simply acted on its own initiative, and falsely claimed that these “alternate” slates had any legal significance whatsoever.
Short history lesson: Hawaii’s dueling elector slates in 1960
The Trump campaign and its right-wing media boosters
engaged in a rhetorical bait-and-switch for their fake electors, often citing a peculiar incident that occurred in the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. This event provided one unusual precedent for “alternate” elector slates — but on closer examination, what the Trump campaign attempted was wildly different, as part of a plot to subvert the actual results of an American election.
The state of Hawaii had a very close vote in 1960, and was in the middle of litigation and an ongoing recount on December 19, the date that year when the Electoral College delegates voted across the country. As a result, on that day the Nixon electors filled out their presidential votes, as they had previously been certified as having won the November election. But so did the slate of Kennedy electors, in case the recount were to show that Kennedy had instead won the state.
As it turned out, the recount indeed flipped the state’s result from Nixon to Kennedy, and the state’s Republican governor duly
signed a second certificate of election in the Kennedy electors’ favor. It was this second slate that was then counted, on the basis of its corrected election results, when then-Vice President Nixon presided over the joint session of Congress to certify Kennedy’s election win.
The Trump campaign’s fake electors were an attempted coup against the election results
The major difference here was that the Kennedy slate in Hawaii had cast their votes on the contingency that the state’s recount would show Kennedy had actually won the election — not via the state legislature or other officials acting by some fiat to nullify the people’s votes from November. And if the recount had ended up still showing Nixon winning the state, then the governor would certainly never have signed a second election certificate for Kennedy.
The fake Trump electors, by contrast, were part of a maneuver to delegitimize the election regardless of the failed court challenges or actual vote results. For example, a
hand recount in Georgia had already reaffirmed Biden’s victory in the state in November — and yet that state’s fake electors still submitted their own “alternate” votes in December, in a continued effort to throw out the election result.
Likewise, one of Trump’s electors from Ohio
claimed two days later during an appearance on Fox Business that “technically, Joe Biden is not the president-elect because seven states are sending competing slates of electors to the Congress,” and that Congress would have to decide which to count. (Each state had officially sent only one Electoral College slate.)
Trump White House press secretary and campaign spokesperson
Kayleigh McEnany also told Fox host Sean Hannity on December 17, 2020, that “there has been an alternative slate of electors voted upon that Congress will decide in January.” (McEnany is now a Fox News commentator.)
How OAN promoted the fake electors
On December 14, 2020, OAN anchor Mike Dinow cited “the 1960 precedent set in Hawaii” and reported that “the White House expects to win fraud cases in courts, and then certify results by alternate electors.” But in the following interview segment between Bobb and then-OAN anchor Patrick Hussion, Bobb further conflated the separate idea of a court victory changing the certified election results versus state legislatures nullifying the voters.
Bobb did not disclose any of her own involvement with the Trump campaign, or in possibly having helped to formulate this specific maneuver.
CHRISTINA BOBB (POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT): What this does, having the GOP electors cast their votes in these states, it preserves the legal remedy should Donald Trump win, either in court or in a state legislature, in the future. So, the Republicans cast their votes today, saying, hey — we’re basically saying that we believe that there is a possibility that this state could flip or turn because there’s enough election fraud in here that it’s still contested. In every state there’s either pending litigation or, you know, negotiations with the state legislators.
On the same day, OAN reporter Pearson Sharp played a video of Trump’s fake electors in Michigan, as they were barred entry to the state Capitol by police. Sharp claimed that they had been the “official state electors,” and said the Michigan state legislature would have to decide which slate to send to Washington. (Just to be clear on this point, the Michigan Capitol was closed to the public that day due to to
“credible threats of violence” while the state’s proper electors met to cast their votes for Biden.)
PEARSON SHARP (REPORTER): That video is all you need to see to understand the lengths being taken to undermine the election. Official state electors are being barred from performing their constitutional duties. Regardless, the electors signed affidavits, and for legal purposes their votes are as good as counted. Now, state legislators must choose which set of electors are sent to Washington, D.C., on January 6. And since the legislatures are largely controlled by Republicans, it could pave the way for victory for President Trump.
Sharp
also later claimed in the run-up to the January 6 joint session of Congress that Pence would have to consider the “competing votes” from different states.
The next day, Bobb interviewed Arizona state legislator Kelly Townsend, who cited the 1960 precedent of Hawaii’s dual slates of electors and said that it was necessary to cast the alternate votes to preserve the option of an audit process or court decision changing the election result. But Townsend went much further, urging Congress to “recognize that there’s an alternate slate, to not award any electors until the issues are resolved in Arizona” — and she also maintained that the state legislature could at any time select new Electoral College members separate from the state election result.
“So it’s not treason,” Townsend told OAN’s audience. “Some people are saying, ‘Oh, it’s treasonous, it’s seditious.’ It’s not any of that, it’s constitutional."
Joe Biden took office a year ago, but OAN’s pro-Trump election propaganda has lived on
On January 9, 2021 — three days after the siege of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters seeking to overturn Biden’s election — Bobb castigated state legislators who “sat helplessly by” and refused to change the election results.
“I personally had conversations with many of them, who went to great lengths to explain to me how they have no authority to do anything,” Bobb said. “They’re so upset about the state of affairs surrounding the election, but they can’t do anything ab
Bobb has shown no sign of stopping her propaganda campaign. On her signature show Weekly Briefing and other OAN programs, Bobb can be seen chatting with fringe lawmakers and far-right pundits about bizarre petitions to recall electors, interviewing election workers about alleged fraud claims, and recapping the latest audit campaign or conspiracy theory of the week to OAN’s glassy-eyed hosts. Bobb was most recently spotted attacking the Wisconsin Election Commission and arguing that there was enough fraud for Wisconsin to decertify the 2020 election.
Last year, Sharp declared that the result of the audit movement, spearheaded by Bobb, would reveal the crimes committed by election officials in covering up the supported fraud, and would then result in potentially “hundreds” or even “tens of thousands” of mass executions. Sharp has also vociferously claimed that the violence committed on January 6, 2021, was really perpetrated by “members of the far-left radical, Stalinist organization known as antifa,” and that Trump supporters had been unfairly swept up and subjected to “torture” since then.
“There was no insurrection,” Sharp has said. “Democrats weaponized the events of January 6 to wield against the American people.”
Bobb, meanwhile, has declared that “Donald Trump's greatest service to this nation is that he exposed the communist takeover of the United States.”
The truth, of course, is that there was an attempted far-right coup — one in which OAN played a major part, along with many other figures in right-wing media.
After spending much of 2020 and the first half of 2021 raging against mask mandates and whining about how forcing workers to get vaccinated represented the trampling of individual liberties, Fox News in recent weeks and months has proudly sprinted ahead into the realm of unrestrained anti-vaccine propaganda.
Loudly embracing what until just a couple years ago was considered loony fringe rhetoric about mainstream inoculations, Rupert Murdoch’s network — where all hosts are fully vaccinated — now unapologetically peddles every conceivable form of medical misinformation as America battles its second year of a public health crisis.
Question: Will we ever know how many people Murdoch’s empire killed during the pandemic?
“Why are we forcing people to get vaccinated when you’re more likely to get the virus if you’re vaccinated in the variant that we have right now?” the network’s Rachel Campos-Duffy recently asked, echoing Fox’s primetime anti-vaxxer, Tucker Carlson: “There is evidence that people who get the booster are more likely to get the latest variant.”
In no other country where Murdoch owns properties and enjoys political leverage, such as Britain and Australia, have his media outlets endangered so many lives the way Fox News has in the U.S. There’s been a conscious decision by Murdoch to unleash on America an anti-science, anti-vaccine campaign the likes of which has never been seen before in modern media, which is why this NPR headline surprised nobody: “Study Finds More COVID-19 Cases Among Viewers Of Fox News Host Who Downplayed Pandemic.”
Why is Murdoch allowing, and even encouraging, the life-threatening programming to fester on Fox? He’s terrified of being outflanked by even more rabid, right-wing media outlets, such as OAN, and Newsmax. Committed to never allowing a sizeable audience take hold to the right of Fox News, Murdoch has made a calculated decision that actively endangering his viewers is preferable to them switching over to another channel.
One month after the 2020 election, Fox’s ratings were reeling as Newsmax vacuumed up MAGA viewers by telling them it's not possible to know who had won the presidential election this year, and that Trump's second term was still within reach. The channel specifically attacked Fox News for crowning Biden president-elect on November 7.
It worked. Back in September of 2020, Newsmax drew just 100,000 viewers a day. Following the election, and while championing Trump’s undemocratic claims of a "stolen" election, Newsmax's audience ballooned to nearly a million viewers. Soon after Joe Biden was declared president-elect, Sean Hannity's 9 p.m. program slid into a last-place position behind MSNBC and CNN, among viewers 25-54.
Murdoch caught a glimpse of Fox News’ future if viewers left in favor of more fringe and even more reckless outlets. His solution? Become more fringe, even more reckless, and use a global health crisis to accomplish that. (Fox soon handed over its 7 p.m. “news” block to a chronic liar, Jesse Watters.)
Today, the billionaire’s media empire inflicts a special kind of pain on the U.S. It’s true his right-wing outlets around the world have been awful on Covid, but it simply doesn’t compare with the war Fox News has unleashed here. For instance, when Australia’s Murdoch-approved Prime Minster Scott Morrison recently said the government would no longer provide free rapid antigen test kits, several Murdoch pundits unloaded on him, denouncing the move as being mean-spirited and “out of touch” with everyday Australians who deserve free and fast testing in order to control the spread of the virus. When Morrison reversed course, Murdoch newspapers mocked his “backflip.”
Also, Murdoch’s News Corp. made headlines last summer when it cancelled a longtime right-wing commentator in Australia. The move was widely seen as punishment for the pundit’s Covid lies. That’s because in Australia, Murdoch’s company operates under different rules and is willing to stand up for common sense when it comes to not pushing obvious Covid-19 lies.
In the States, we have an entire Murdoch network that’s not only encouraging millions of viewers not to get vaccinated, but claims the inoculation might kill them, the government cannot be trusted, and the vaccine poses a danger to pregnant women.
Too cowardly to pull back his top-rated U.S. hosts, Murdoch refuses to protect American news consumers from Fox News’ cult-like disinformation regarding a miraculously safe and effective vaccine.
That’s a huge reason why the U.S. vaccination rate has stalled so far behind other industrialized nations — the Biden White House is facing a cynical and powerful anti-vax movement that’s unlike anything else in the world. We are the only country that’s simultaneously trying to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic while battling a homegrown, deep-pocketed political and media crusade determined to keep the pandemic going for partisan reasons.
The U.S. has become a global leader in pandemic lies, and that’s because of Murdoch, who rushed to get vaccinated one year ago. All that while the network churns out lies about the pandemic and it couldn’t care less that nearly one million Americans, including a huge block of Fox viewers, have perished.
Fox’s ratings are up and Biden’s approvals are down — that’s all Murdoch cares about.
