How AT&T Helped Launch the Fox News Wannabe

We learned this week that if you want to blame anyone for the far-right cable news channel OAN…. blame AT&T.

OAN is the cable news network for the people that feel that Fox News is just too liberal for the,. OAN is most often void of telling the truth and continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reuters reports that 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.

AT&T spokesman Jim Greer declined to comment on the testimony about OAN’s revenue streams, citing confidentiality agreements. He said that DirecTV broadcasts “many news channels that offer viewpoints across the political spectrum.”

“We have always sought to provide a wide variety of content and programming that would be of interest to customers, and do not dictate or control programming on channels we carry,” Greer said. “Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.”

The same AT&T that currently owns CNN is also the money behind OAN.

I think I need to switch my cellphone carrier.

Just saying….