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AT&T, the country’s largest telecommunications provider, has proven to be a crucial cog in the operation of One America News, the right-wing news channel that has seen its audience increase thanks to its promotion of unfounded claims that the 2020 elections were “stolen”. by Donald Trump.
A Reuters investigation found that AT&T had been responsible for 90% of OAN’s revenue since the news channel launched in 2013. AT&T disputed the report, saying their partnership with DirecTV was only ” broadcast ”the channel.
Robert Herring Sr, founder and CEO of OAN, who shares a large number of viewers with Fox News, said in a 2019 deposition that the channel was the brainchild of AT&T executives.
“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” he said at the time, according to Reuters. “They only had one, it was Fox News, and they had seven more from each other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped on it and built one.
AT&T provided millions of dollars in funds to OAN, with the company offering the herring $ 250 million for the network, according to the report.
But Jim Greer, assistant vice president of corporate communications at AT&T, refuted claims that AT&T “finances” OAN.
“AT&T has never had a financial stake in OAN’s success,” he said in a statement to the Guardian Thursday, a day after the Reuters report was released. He said that when AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015, the company no longer wanted to have OAN on its platform, and that OAN then sued DirecTV.
In 2017, OAN and DirecTV entered into a “commercial distribution agreement,” which means that DirecTV only hosts the OAN channel and pays them to broadcast their content.
That, Greer says, is different from the channel’s “funding”, adding that AT&T only funds CNN.
“DirecTV offers a wide variety of programming, including many news channels that offer a variety of views, but it does not dictate or control the programming of the channels,” added Greer. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
AT&T and DirecTV went their separate ways in August.
OAN, which primarily attracts older white Americans and conservative Republicans, has a significantly smaller audience than other conservative media such as Fox News. According to a Pew poll, just 7% of a sample of 12,045 adults polled said in March that they watched OAN for political news, while the number was six times higher for Fox viewers.
Meanwhile, OAN remains in the headlines for dabbling in conspiracy theories and explicitly advocating violence against people he falsely claims to have “stolen” from the 2020 election. The channel’s Facebook page draws comments making false statements, such as that Democrats were behind the January 6 uprising.
The Guardian has contacted Herring Networks for further comment.
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