Conspiracy-Mongering Media Company One America News Network Is On Life Support
But not because liberal elites killed it: OANN's corporate funder, AT&T, deserted the project
If you have a friend who is a political news junkie, please go ahead and:
This week’s big TV scoop is WarnerMedia’s decision to remove One America News Network (OANN) from the cornucopia of offerings on its cable network, Comcast/Xfinity.
OANN is less than a decade old, and what success it had was almost entirely driven by teh Trump phenomenon. It was launched on July 4, 2013, a cooperative venture by conservative media entrepreneur Robert Herring, Sr. and the Washington Times, a newspaper founded by South Korean religious cult leader Sun Myung Moon. Herring’s reasons for founding it were that Fox News, which owned the cable conservative talk and news space almost exclusively, was too centrist, and he believed that conservatives need more choices.
That wasn’t the whole truth: according to a 2021 report by Reuters media correspondent John Schiffman, it was executives at AT&T who saw the market for an even wackier version of Fox, and provided tens of millions of dollars in funding for OANN. “Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms,” Schiff explain, “including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.”
The channel, which never met a conspiracy theory it didn’t repeat, was so Trumpy that in early 2020, Hicks Equity Partners, a Trump family ally, sought to put together a group of GOP investors as part of a $250 million bid. At that point, OANN was available in fewer than 35 million homes. That didn’t work out, possibly because the cable industry itself, increasingly undermined by cheaper streaming services, is in a period of prolonged uncertainty. Cord-cutting, or ditching a cable subscription for a web-based streaming service like Hulu or Roku, was on the rise—and frankly, Trump wasn’t. Now in the second year of the pandemic, even the Former Guy’s most robust supporters might have wondered how a Trump channel would fare if Trump, whose approval rating had fallen to 34%, were no longer president.
Then, in May, 2021, capitalism did what capitalism does. AT&T reorganized, selling WarnerMedia and its associated brands—which include CNN and HBOMax—to Discovery, a deal that created the biggest streaming company ever. This was a business deal driven by the sharp uptick in cord-cutting: between 2018 and 2021, over 10% of American households cut the cord and switched to cheaper streaming services. That isn’t a problem for the communications giants: if you watch HBO’s Succession, you know that distributing content libraries (movies, TV series, games), often charging a separate fee to access them, are the future.
So, what are the implications of this for the future of OANN? It isn’t pretty.
The first is that OANN is about to become almost invisible to everyone but its core viewership. The network has about 1.5 million viewers on YouTube, although that is not anything they can count on. The tech company briefly suspended OANN from monetizing last year for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, and could easily do it again. But OANN was already on the ropes after DirecTV, which accounted for 90% of its peak viewership, announced in mid-January that the company would not renew its contract with OANN in April, 2022.
This, in turn, creates a looming cash crunch of epic proportions because of the way cable television is financed. Alhough there is often a very high focus on which corporations advertise on right-wing shows, advertising can fluctuate and a network can still survive. This is because the lifeblood of a network is so-called “carriage fees,” a charge bundled into your cable or streaming service bill for each channel that you have access to, whether you watch it or not. For Fox News, in 2020, that was $2.00. Although it has probably declined since, Comcast had 18.55 million households in the third quarter of 2021: that translates to about $37 million that flow into the coffers every year just for existing.
OANN probably charged less than half of what Fox can command, but that river of cash, already diminished by the loss of DirecTV, will make OANN entirely advertising-dependent in a few weeks. Now let’s add another burden: Domnion Voting Machines is suing OANN, among others, for defamation, due to the network broadcasting baseless charges about its equipment during the 2020 election.
OANN claims that its, major advertiser, AT&T, has pledged to remain with them, but this means very little, in part because advertising alone cannot carry a cable network. But it’s also weak tea, since the telecom giant first permitted DirecTV, a subsidiary company, to dump them, and then sold WarnerMedia without anything written into the deal that protected the network they helped to create from being thrown under the bus. Although OANN is suing the satellite provider for $1 billion in damages, the loss of Comcast/Xfinity should finish them off, even if the case is allowed to come to trial: the company is the largest in the United States, and owns 97% of the cable market in Washington D.C.
This is all to say: the wheels are coming off at OANN, and there will be no one to save it—not even their friend Donald, who hates nothing worse than failure.
What I’m writing:
I have been a Patricia Highsmith fan since I first saw Strangers on a Train in a college film class. So I jumped on it when the new feminist book review founded by Jennifer Baumgardner, Liber, gave me a chance to review a recently published edited volume of Highsmith’s private writing. (March/April 2022)
Short takes:
Today is the first anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings, in which eight people, including six Asian women, were murdered by white vigilante Robert Aaron Long. He was supposedly eliminating the temptation for his sinful sexual impulses. But these were only a few of the assaults that led to a 339% rise in anti-Asian hate crimes nationwide in 2021. Activist Yong Ae Yue, who lost his mother that day, told Axios Atlanta reporter Kristal Dixon that “there’s no single answer in solving the problem of violence against Asian Americans, but increasing cultural awareness, educating people about history, and improving economic opportunities for women are basic starting points.” (March 16, 2022)
At The Editorial Board, John Stoehr begins with Donald J. Trump’s peculiar messaging about Russia’s attack on Ukraine, a nationalism that is empty of any reference to “principles of freedom, sovereignty or any other aspect of the postwar international order,” and then speculates about the many political ties between Russia and the American far-right that this crisis could expose. “Russian foreign nationals seeking to influence US elections have a wide range of options through which they can funnel foreign money in support of candidates for public office,” Stoehr notes, “with little or no detection.” And that is precisely Trump’s style. (March 15, 2022)
Culture wars politics seem to have completely taken over conversations about education—so it’s nice to see some good news for a change. Jennifer C. Berkshire of The Nation shows that voters overwhelmingly reject these false issues in New Hampshire. They are proving this by electing progressives who plan to tackle—well, education. “Instead of resonating with voters, the right’s efforts to weaponize cultural grievances appears to have alienated them,” Berkshire writes. The lesson for Democrats? Censorship repels a broad swathe of voters, and Republican attempts to ban books and suppress free speech should be a significant focus for the midterms. (March 15, 2022)
Do you ever get sick of reading on your computer? Well, good news: You can now read Political Junkie in the new Substack app for iPhone and iPad. I like it—now, I get to read the Substacks I subscribe to as if htey were a magazine.
Conspiracy-Mongering Media Company One America News Network Is On Life Support
Far be it to contradict Yong Ae Yue, but I think he fails to grasp the nature of misogyny when he says that "increasing cultural awareness, educating people about history, and improving economic opportunities for women" will have much effect on this matters. They are, of course, good things to do and the average American knows little about Asian culture. But the truth is that the twisted masculinities that predominate in our country don't care about history or culture and will hunt women down, whether we work in spas and nail salons, bakeries, or corporate offices. As I see it, Yong's mother and her colleagues were above all gunned down for being women.
Re: Patricia Highsmith....I have come to her late in life and am thoroughly enjoying the catch-up.