One America News Network, OAN as it is commonly known, is a prominent news organization that arose during the Republican Civil War (this is my own term, signifying the time between 2008 and 2016 in which the 2007-08 Financial Crisis, the Tea Party movement, and the election of a young, liberal, and black President resulted in a split between establishment Republicans and more working class, rural, white Republicans (there is a PBS documentary that covers this expertly)). The site, for some time, was regulated to the margins and ignored mainstream Conservatives and media organizations, yet in recent years (due to President Trump’s actions and rhetoric), has been brought into the forefront of American media and political discourse.
Naturally, due to the closeness of OAN to the previous Chief Executive and the Republican Party, the organization had begun serving almost as a surrogate public affairs office for President Trump, predominantly putting out sycophantic pieces on Trump himself and approving of an extreme right-wing agenda and policy. The site has been accused of putting out conspiracy theories and utilizing extremely poor judgement in reporting, which, like what has been shown before with The Gateway Pundit and Free Thought Project, is common with many organizations that peddle fake news for a larger political purpose.
While the site’s “About” page is full of rather basic and, while important, more mundane, information (indicating their ownership history, availability of content), the video they provide serves as something of a mission statement. In their video, one of their anchors states, “It’s time for an honest assessment of our national’s leadership, our foreign policy, our fiscal responsibility, and our national security. It’s time to switch things up. If you’re looking for credible news, you’ve come to the right place”. The organization has a large following throughout social media; on Facebook, the organization has a following of over 1.5 million with another 1.4 million on both Twitter and YouTube.
So, the site is claiming to provide an unbiased, bipartisan, and solidly reported viewpoint on foreign policy, domestic politics, national defense, and economics matters pertaining to the United States. I argue that OAN fails to uphold these credentials and instead presents an extremely biased view of these matters to their audience and acts as a surrogate mouthpiece for the President and blatantly, unashamedly supports him no matter the stance taken.
It is easy to call a media organization fake news, however it is much more different to prove that one is such a fake news organization. As I have mentioned in other analyses, because there are so many differing schools of thought and the ability for political and personal bias to inflect upon one’s definition, I have chosen to follow academia’s definition of what fake news is. Taking the University of Michigan’s definition, they state, “[fake news are] those news stories that are false: the story itself is fabricated, with no verifiable facts, sources, or quotes.
Sometimes these stories may be propaganda that is intentionally designed to mislead the reader, or may be designed as “clickbait” written for economic incentives… Some stories may have a nugget of truth, but lack contextualizing details. They may not include any verifiable facts or sources. Some stories may include basic verifiable facts, but are written using language that is deliberately inflammatory, leaves out pertinent details or only presents one viewpoint”. So, what fake news is defined as is fabrications within a story, a neglect to publish fully the facts, an extreme bias in news stories on certain events without any backing by evidence or a lack of proper sourcing. In this analysis, I aim to prove that OAN is a fake news organization and engages in conspiracy theory and pseudoscience promulgation.
Now, before I begin my analysis of OAN, I would like to comment on the capitalization. The site’s URL code says “oann” and the capitalization of the media group seen when one tries to find their site on search engines seems to indicate that the abbreviation would be OANN.
However, there are a few discrepancies in this as shown by the news agency’s site and on their own broadcasts, where, in the lower left-hand corner, the agency’s abbreviation is OAN. The site’s main page is a prime example of this odd juxtaposition:
Because of this, I will be, from this point on, referring to the site as OAN, given that is how the organization themselves and critics of the site refer to them.
The Veracity of OAN
In the organization’s seven years of active participation in politics and media reporting, the group has transformed from what was, initially, a strongly conservative media platform to a news agency that is one of the most unbiased and uncritical reporting organizations currently in American media. However, more important than the site’s political affiliations are their dedication to factual accuracy, their ability to truthfully report on situations involving economics, foreign policy, domestic politics, and social issues. In my research, I have found that the source is blinded due to their political bias and incapable of accurately reporting on these aforementioned issues. Multiple times, the source has given into conspiracy theories, pushed stories without proper sources or verifiable facts, made misleading statements, and overall acted unprofessionally and disrespectfully to the American public.
On a 19 April 2018 newscast, commentator Liz Wheeler interviewed California State Assemblyman Travis Allen of the 72nd District of California (northern Orange County) to discuss a bill that was then before the assembly, Assembly Bill 2943. To quote the newscast, Wheeler alleged that the bill, “essentially criminaliz[es] religious beliefs,” and then proposed that this bill would “prohibit the sale of the Bible which teaches these things about sexual morality,” to which Assemblyman Allen responded, “…literally according to how this law is written, yes it would”. This was later reshared and tweeted multiple times on social media, including by Wheeler with the caption, “A bill in California could ban Christian books…even potentially the Bible!”.
However, the Assemblyman is severely mistaken and Wheeler’s leading question is inaccurate. To quote FactCheck.org, the renowned fact-checking body sponsored by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania:
“California lawmakers have advanced a bill that would prohibit the advertising or selling of “sexual orientation change efforts” — or so-called “conversion therapies,” which many medical organizations oppose… They have not proposed banning the Bible… If enacted, the legislation would add sexual orientation change efforts to a list of business practices considered illegal when undertaken “in a transaction intended to result or that results in the sale or lease of goods or services to any consumer.” Specifically, it would outlaw “advertising, offering to engage in, or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts with an individual.” Sexual orientation change efforts are defined in the bill as “practices that seek to change an individual’s sexual orientation. This includes efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”…Those claims [that the bible would be banned] are indeed not supported by the language in the legislation”
To put it more simply, the bill’s goal is to, “Prohibit SOCE from being performed on anyone, not only children under the age of 18,” and “Prohibit the advertising or sale of SOCE as a service”. So really, due to an extreme misunderstanding of the bill’s wording (and, most probably, a desire to find something controversial and inflammatory), OAN and the Assemblyman both spread misinformation and caused an uproar on social media.
In a 08 May 2020 clip (which also first aired on Tipping Point with Liz Wheeler), Wheeler listed, “things that happened that really mattered,” while posting the clip on her Facebook page with the text, “What the MSM was afraid to tell you”. She also states, “A new study shows there was no detectable surge in COVID-19 from the Wisconsin elections. Stanford University and the University of Hong Kong researchers found, and I quote, “Up to 300,000 people voted in person and waiting times in Milwaukee averaged one and a half to two hours. Poll workers had surgical masks and latex gloves, hand sanitizer was made available to voters, isopropyl alcohol wipes were used to clean voting equipment, and painting tape and signs were used to facilitate social distancing. Taken together, there is no evidence to date that there was a surge of infections due to the April 7th, 2020 election in Wisconsin, which is a relatively low-level of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the U.S. But did the mainstream media report on this? No, no, in fact, the mainstream media pretended there was a deadly surge of COVID cases thanks to Wisconsinites voting”.
PolitiFact, in a 12 May article, found this claim false and, in fact, gave it a “Pants on Fire” rating, stating:
“Wheeler is right about there being no evidence of a surge. We’ve repeatedly debunked claims that there was one. But her generalization about “mainstream media” claiming otherwise? That’s ridiculous…For starters, let’s be clear that there was no election “surge.” As of May 11, 2020, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services identified 71 people who tested positive for COVID-19 after voting or working the polls in the April 7 election, according to spokeswoman Elizabeth Goodsitt. The important caveat here is that it’s impossible to say how many were infected at the polls since some reported other possible exposures. The 71 tally runs from April 9 to 21, when the two-week incubation period for the coronavirus would have ended. There were 1,864 positive cases in that span in Wisconsin, so the cases known to intersect with election activity accounted for less than 4% of that total. Wheeler’s report cites no sources for the claim the media said there was a surge in cases, so we cast a wide net looking at news coverage ourselves… CNN — a favorite target for far-right claims of media bias —reported on April 22 about what was then 19 cases in people who voted or worked the polls. The third and fourth paragraphs of the story detail the caveat that those people had other exposures, so it’s impossible to say the election was the source. ABC News published a similar report April 21, prominently noting the same caveat in the second paragraph. The Associated Press reporting on updated data April 29, said 50 people connected to the election had tested positive. It noted the origin caveat in the second paragraph. Like the CNN and ABC reports the week before, it contained no hyperbolic language calling this a surge or anything close to that. In-state sources were even more clear. An April 22 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story was headlined, “Two weeks after election, COVID-19 cases have not spiked in Wisconsin but experts urge caution about conclusions.”
A Wisconsin State Journal report on April 23 worked the “can’t say for certain” caveat into the lead sentence. It did the same for a May 8 story when the tally had grown to 67”
In PolitiFact’s final statement on the issue:
“The One America News Network claimed in a video posted to Facebook that “mainstream media pretended there was a deadly surge in COVID cases thanks to Wisconsinites voting.” We didn’t find a single traditional or “mainstream” news outlet that characterized the election-related cases as a surge or anything close to that — much less anything that would support this kind of sweeping generalization. The reports prominently noted the caveat that officials can’t say for certain that the election caused the cases we are aware of, and they had made no exaggerated claims about how large those numbers were. (And, to be clear, the 71 cases certainly don’t constitute a surge.) So Wheeler is flat wrong in both her claim about coverage and the related implication from the use of “pretended” that something was reported wrong intentionally”
while also noting that OAN removed the story and Wheeler deleted her tweet after the previous organizations found fault in the statement.
In another 12 January 2020 newscast, OAN made the claim that Federal Bureau of Investigation engaged in illegal wiretaps of President Trump, later apologizing for such actions with Chanel Rion, OAN’s White House correspondent, stating,
“FBI head Christopher Wray, in a statement to a FISA court Friday [10 January 2020] apologized in response to a scorching DOJ Inspector General report exposing FBI abuse of wiretapping and surveillance warrants issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, otherwise known as FISA. Wray’s apology comes as a result of a FISA court looking into the wrongful surveillance of Trump advisor Carter Page. In a statement to the FISA court, Wray writes that the FBI’s behavior surveilling the Trump campaign was “unacceptable and unrepresentative of the FBI as an institution,” and that “the FBI deeply regrets the errors and omissions identified by” the Inspector General — errors and omissions that allowed the FBI to continue to surveil what we have now learned [were] completely innocent Trump associates like Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and Gen. Mike Flynn”
However, Wray never admitted that the FBI illegally wiretapped the President and did not apologize for anything resembling such action.
Basically, Wray went before the FISA Court on 10 January to discuss:
“a major report published by the Justice Department’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December 2019… which examined potential collusion between Trump campaign associates – in particular Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Mike Flynn, and Paul Manafort – and Russian government efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election. Horowitz’s report examined, in particular, an FBI application for a warrant to conduct surveillance on Page, which the bureau filed with the FISA court in October 2016, and for which it subsequently applied for a renewal on three occasions during 2017. The inspector general highlighted seven “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the original application, and 10 “additional significant errors” in the renewal applications”
The report itself, specified that, “so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations that was briefed to the highest levels within the FBI, and that FBI officials expected would eventually be subjected to close scrutiny, raised significant questions regarding the FBI chain of command’s management and supervision of the FISA process … In our view, this was a failure of not only the operational team, but also of the managers and supervisors, including senior officials, in the chain of command”.
This concerned the FISA court who then called Wray to testify which he did, stating, “[The FBI] deeply regrets these errors and omissions identified by the OIG. The OIG report… describe[s] conduct that is unacceptable and unrepresentative of the FBI as an institution… the FBI is committed to working with the Court and DOJ to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the FISA process”. Snopes finally notes, “Wray did not exactly “apologize,” in his statement, though he did express regret at the FBI’s failures in the Page investigation. Contrary to OAN’s false claims, Wray certainly did not say that the FBI had wiretapped Donald Trump, either legally or illegally, and he therefore certainly did not apologize for any such actions”.
So, Wray never admitted to illegally wiretapping the President nor did the FISA court or DOJ OIG report make that claim. Due to a serious misunderstanding of the report itself and Wray’s apology (possibly intentionally to further support their own political machinations), OAN spread misinformation on this incident.
In another OAN newscast, this one broadcast on 20 October 2017, the news organization tries making the claim that, “English and Welsh police report a mass rise in crime spearheaded by a surge in violent and sexual offenses. Law enforcement recorded over a total of five million offenses during the twelve months up to June of this year [2017], which is a 13% rise over the previous period. Authorities say cases of harassment have risen as much as 877% in some areas. Officials speculate the surge in crime may have resulted from the mass migration and spread of violent ideologies, including Sharia law and radical Islam”.
Moments after this newscast aired, President Trump tweeted the information stating, “Just out report: “United Kingdom crime rises 13% annually amid spread of Radical Islamic terror.” Not good, we must keep America safe!”.
However, the information that the President repeated and what OAN stated was factually inaccurate and Snopes, in their assessment of this, found many problems with both OAN and the President’s interpretation of such information. They write, “The statistical report Trump is alluding to actually relates specifically to England and Wales and not the U.K., which also includes Scotland and Northern Ireland. In any case – Trump’s linking of Islamist terrorism to a 13 percent rise in recorded crime “in the U.K.” (or in England and Wales, for that matter) is grossly misleading”.
The article then notes that OAN’s statement of:
“Officials speculate the surge in crime may have resulted from the mass migration and spread of violent ideologies, including Sharia law and radical Islam,” was not stated by any UK official and, “migration from outside the European Union actually slowed in the year ending March 2017, as compared to the year before that”
As well, Snopes makes a point to note that an offense in the UK does not mean a criminal conviction nor arrest, but rather that an incident was simply reported to the police. Taking a report from the UK’s Office of National Statistics’ 2017 Crime Survey of England and Wales:
“The data show[sic] that between July 2016 and June 2017, police recorded a total of 5,156,928 offenses in England and Wales, an increase of 583,782 offenses (12.77 percent) from the number recorded between July 2015 and June 2016, which was 4,573,146… The police-recorded crime statistics include 35 homicides and 294 attempted murder offenses relating to three Islamist terrorist attacks during the past 12 months… from a statistical and logical point of view, the absolute maximum possible increase in Islamist terror-related offenses in the past year is 10,439… This figure represents 1.79 percent of the overall increase of 583,782 in total crimes recorded, but even at that, it is almost certainly a significant over-estimation (because not all crimes under “other offenses against the state and public order” would have been terrorism-related, and not all of those would have been related to Islamist terror.)”
This entire ordeal shows one of the main problems with statistics. Utilized or tweaked in a slight way (or even just pronounced in a different way), they can be utilized to justify everything and anything. That is one of the reasons why J. Edgar Hoover loved to utilize statistics in making it seem as though the FBI, in its early years, was extremely adept at stopping criminal activity (even though they were ignoring organized crime). With this case study, one can see that OAN, either through a simple misunderstanding of calculations and percentages or a more deliberate and deceitful attempt to misinform people, circulated factually inaccurate information.
In another newscast, this one airing on 22 April 2020 and reposted in a short video by Liz Wheeler on Facebook, Wheeler again spreads disinformation. She states, after quoting the Director of the Institute of Cancer Policy at King’s College-London, that, “To put it simply, politicians in the UK and here in the US have banned non-emergent surgeries and procedures. But don’t be fooled by the phrase non-essential surgeries, we’re not talking about a cosmetic nose job or a butt lift. The definition of non-essential surgery just means any surgery that is scheduled in advanced,” before listing surgeries to remove brain tumors, organ transplants, mastectomies, and biopsies as being “non-essential and prohibited,” and directly blaming the lockdowns for these problems.
However, she confuses the terms of “non-essential” and “elective” surgeries. Ohio’s Department of Health defines a non-essential surgery as, “a procedure that can be delayed without undue risk to the current or future health of a patient” and this is confirmed by the American College of Surgeons own page documenting the state public health orders. An elective surgery, as defined by Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, is “a surgery you choose to have for a better quality of life, but not for a life-threatening condition. But in some cases it may be for a serious condition such as cancer. Examples of elective surgery include removing a mole or wart, and having kidney stones removed”. Examining the American College of Surgeons’ list of public health orders as well, one can easily see how, in the vast majority of cases and in U.S. states, “exceptions are made when a life or severe health issues are at stake”. Lead Stories, a fact-checking organization aligned with the Poynter Institute, also noted that, in Alabama, Colorado, Florida, and Louisiana, the state governments there were allowing these surgeries to continue on.
In a 30 November 2019 newscast, titled, “Adam Schiff, Democrats Under Fire For Contradictions Over Ukraine” alleges that:
“…Democrats are eager to attack President Trump for his alleged ties to Ukraine despite being unable to find a shred of evidence for wrongdoing. The lead attack dog in the Democrat’s lineup is California Representative Adam Schiff, a radical, left-winger who’s been repeatedly caught telling flat-out lies, such as making up what the President said in his phone call to Ukraine [followed by a video of the President making the claim; while Schiff did exaggerate at times, the truth of this matter is somewhat more complicated]. So, what could Schiff be trying to divert attention away from regarding Ukraine? For starters, his connection to Ukrainian industrialist and arms dealer Igor Pasternak…Pasternak makes weapons and airships for both United States and Ukraine…New evidence appears to show Schiff has received donations from two U.S. corporations tied to the 7.4-billion-dollar corruption scandal involving Ukrainian gas giant Burisma. A report from The Gateway Pundit shows Adam Schiff has received numerous donations from both Black Rock and Franklin Templeton investments, both of which are now part of a criminal investigation for laundering money through Burisma. Considering his close ties to a Ukrainian arms dealer and his funding from business involved in a corruption scandal, it seems clear why Schiff would push his anti-Russian narrative but also wouldn’t want anyone investigating Burisma”
PolitiFact, finding this becoming popular on social media, ran an article on the claim that Schiff was under criminal investigation for his ties to these companies and gave the claim a “Pants on Fire” rating. In their analysis they write:
“One America News seems to have confused donations with investment earnings. Campaign finance records show neither of the two investment companies mentioned – Blackrock and Franklin Templeton – made any campaign donations to Schiff. On his 2017 financial disclosure form, Schiff showed dividends, capital gains and interest earned on seven funds managed by the Blackrock and Franklin Templeton firms, out of a total of 38 investments. So, there’s a “connection,” but not the sort that the One America News report described. The claim about an underlying “criminal investigation for laundering money” comes from an article on the Ukrainian news website Interfax Ukraine. At a news conference, two members of parliament called for an investigation into the alleged diversion of $7.4 billion by deposed former president Viktor Yanukovych. They said, according to “investigative journalists,” Ukraine’s prosecutor general has “suspicions” of money laundering. The Ukrainian lawmakers mentioned Burisma and the two fund management firms, but offered no clear connection between Burisma and the other two companies. The pair cited no official materials from the Prosecutor General’s office. They said nothing about Schiff. Many conservative websites have been carrying this story, and, from what we see, the connection to Schiff stems solely from his holdings managed by the two fund management firms…The notion that Schiff has “connections” to Burisma oil stems from a news conference held by two Ukrainian lawmakers, who actually never mentioned Schiff or presented official documents. The lawmakers called for an investigation; they did not announce one. The news report confused earnings on mutual fund investments with campaign donations. The firms cited gave no money to Schiff”
Due to an extreme misunderstanding of what the evidence OAN claimed to show and utilizing minimal evidence to back up their claims, the organization severely misinformed the American public and, based on the amount of people who watched the video on Facebook, at least 199,000 people.
So, repeatedly, OAN has engaged in severe misinformation and has deliberately twisted context, misunderstood basic information, and has taken information that is not the most credible nor solid as truth. There are also examples of OAN engaging in such conduct to an even more destructive degree, engaging in conspiracy theories and faulty reporting to further a conservative political goal.
Because OAN is a news television station rather than a print medium (like The Gateway Pundit), much of their content is live and aired on television, with a series of assorted clips being uploaded to YouTube. As well, a lot of their content is also deleted and this is deliberate. In a NewsGuard Technologies report on OAN, they write, “Because the site deletes most content after a few weeks, inaccurate content eventually disappears from the site without being corrected. Most of the articles cited above [in their analysis] are no longer live on the site, but can be found on YouTube”. This is very odd and suspicious of a news agency to take this type of action. This makes finding more information about the site difficult and determining their political, social, economic, and foreign policy decisions all the more difficult. As well, it is not very transparent and seemingly suggests that the network is hiding something. Because their content is quite conspiratorial and a lot of what I will discuss in a moment is factually incorrect, it seems as though this method of deleting articles a series of weeks after publication may be a way to remove those articles that are factually inaccurate or baseless from the main webpage’s archives, however, this is just my own opinion.
In one newscast titled, “OAN Investigation Finds No Evidence of Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria” which was uploaded to YouTube on 16 April 2018, OAN newscaster Pearson Sharp stated:
“We want to announce that One America News has an exclusive discovery; we went to Douma [Syrian city 6 miles northeast of Damascus] today, we got exclusive access, and we were brought into the town of Douma, where the alleged chemical attack happened. We were brought in with a government escort and shown the areas where the chemical attack allegedly happened and got to speak with residents in the area and were even able to visit the hospital where the white helmets showed the video of the people being hosed down…Not one of the people that I spoke to in that neighborhood said that they had seen anything or heard anything about a chemical attack on that day, they said they were going about their normal business, everything was pretty much business as usual in the neighborhood that day and they didn’t see anything out of the ordinary… the rebels were desperate and they needed a ploy to help get the Syrian Army off their backs, so they can escape… The residents told me [this] — and again, I’m using that phrase a lot, because I want it to be clear that this is not an opinion, this is not propaganda, as some have accused. This is simply facts that we found on the ground when we were in the town. Things that we saw first-hand”
Now, while the newscast seems to offer concrete evidence via witnesses that an attack did not occur, the first thing that caught my eye was when he stated “we were brought in with a government escort”; that automatically is suspicious and I was reminded of how, when journalists would visit North Korea, they would be highly suspicious of the people they met with because they were aware that much of their interactions would be staged.
This is pointed out in a ThinkProgress article explicitly on OAN’s reporting:
“[OAN] and Sharp’s reporting falls short in many respects, but perhaps most glaring is its apparent inability to provide concrete evidence to support any of its wild claims. Despite stating that his report is “not propaganda,” for instance, much of what Sharp relays is based on information passed to him during a visit arranged by Syrian government forces, which have traditionally relied on mass disinformation campaigns in the wake of deadly attacks to twist the narrative in their favor. Sharp also states that he was able to visit the site of the actual attack, something international inspectors have not been able to do. At no point does [OAN] try to mask the pro-Assad language peppering the report. At one point, Sharp even goes so far as to say that “the [residents say they] were incredibly grateful that President Assad had liberated the town; they were completely in support of President Assad.”…Both Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top Pentagon officials stated on Friday and over the weekend that Syria and Russia — a key ally of Assad — had begun spreading misinformation about the attack in the hours immediately after it reportedly took place, with Russian trolls swarming social media platforms like Twitter to circulate pro-Assad propaganda. “We can all see that a Russia disinformation campaign is in full force this morning, but [its] desperate attempts at deflection cannot change the facts,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on Saturday, at a U.N. Security Council meeting… The OANN[sic] report is only the latest instance of conservative media and right-wing figures in the United States pushing a conspiracy theory popular among far-right groups, who believe Russian and pro-Assad claims that the attack never happened, and that so-called “Deep State” actors faked the incident to force President Trump to retaliate”
As well, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons released a report based upon a serious amount of data which, “gave “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place”… The watchdog also said it found no… evidence to support the government’s claim that a local facility was being used by rebel fighters to produce chemical weapons” however they did not assign blame as, though the OPCW now has the power to do so, the fact-finding team did not have that mandate. Promulgating this type of story, based upon evidence that should be viewed skeptically and not willfully reported on, is very poor on OAN’s part and quite disrespectful to their reader base and to the American public.
In December of 2019, perhaps most famously, OAN decided to engage in a long interview with Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer and former Mayor of New York City:
“…in which he pushed increasingly convoluted conspiracy theories about the Biden family and Ukraine. And he brought along men he presented as witnesses able to verify his claims, including Andrii Derkach, a member of Ukraine’s parliament who is also a promoter of Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theories, and Yuri Lutsenko, a former prosecutor who has clashed with the US’s former Ambassador the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch… Giuliani and several of his associates have long maintained — without verified evidence, and despite federal assertions otherwise — that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election on behalf of the Democrats. He also claims that former Vice President Joe Biden pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to protect his son, Hunter, (and Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company Hunter served on the board of) from investigation, and that former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was anti-Trump. Each of these theories has been debunked, but Giuliani raised them all on OAN, focusing heavily on the Bidens,” before accusing the Bidens of extortion and bribery and maintain that Joe Biden even gave a confession at a 2018 session of the Council on Foreign Relations which, “wasn’t a confession, and unlike Trump’s asks of Ukraine, the former vice president’s request was sanctioned by the US government and the international community. And although Biden may not have mentioned his son, in pressing for Shokin to be replaced by a prosecutor more interested in anti-corruption work, he was placing his son and Burisma in more danger of being investigated, not less”
Furthermore, Vox notes in their discussion of the meetings:
“The witnesses and evidence Giuliani presented to support his case are equally nonsensical. For instance, OAN showed what it said was a document from Latvian prosecutors that casts Burisma as being involved in corruption. The document was meant to show Hunter Biden was involved in money laundering; instead — if it is real — it merely confirms what was already known: a number of countries were concerned about Burisma and its business practices, and were frustrated Ukrainian prosecutors weren’t doing more to investigate it. Hunter Biden’s decision to join such a company doesn’t demonstrate good judgment (as he acknowledged in October), but the document is far from a smoking gun. And Giuliani’s witnesses are not overly credible. He cites Shokin himself, one of the fountainheads of the Biden firing conspiracy theory, who was accused of lying on an application for a US visa by Yovanovitch’s sworn congressional testimony. Further adding to questions of the credibility of Shokin and his documents are Giuliani’s claim that “Shokin’s med records show he was poisoned, died twice, and was revived.” He also relies on Shokin’s successor, Yuri Lutsenko, who was also almost involved in a business deal with Giuliani. In early 2019, the lawyer’s firm proposed that Lutsenko, who at that time was still prosecutor general, authorize a payment of $200,000 to help the Ukrainian government find embezzled money. Lutsenko has admitted to lying to a conservative journalist, giving him a false statement that cast Yovanovitch in a negative light. Given the witnesses he brought forward and the quality of the evidence he presented, it isn’t clear that Giuliani discovered anything during his Ukraine trip that will lend any credence to his conspiracy theories. But less important than whether they are true, is whether the president is convinced by Giuliani’s findings and acts on them”
In a Politico article which discussed this event, the authors spoke to Kathleen Culver, the director for journalism ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which marks, “I think this completely crosses a line… I would define one of the central characteristics of journalism as independence and here there is no independence. It is taking a source and bringing that source into the actual information gathering. By making Giuliani a central figure in the gathering of information,” she added, “I think they’ve moved out of the realm of journalism and into the realm of advocacy,” with the dean of Hofstra University’s Herbert School of Communication making similar criticisms. No matter how one examines this, and regardless of the political bias one holds, I think most sensible people would agree that having someone so closely tied to the administration being investigated perform what the journalists themselves should be investigating is wrong and inherently biased, while also violating the ethical codes journalists take upon themselves when engaging in a story.
In one of my other analyses, the one on The Gateway Pundit, I wrote about how the site engaged in misinformation by relying on an anonymous Twitter user who claimed [in what effectively would be hearsay] that his wife had been told by a friend in Alabama that this friend was paid money by the Washington Post to fabricate stories about Judge Roy Moore’s sexual assault allegations. It appears that OAN fell for the Pundit’s story as they repeated the information on their newscast while also claiming that the Post’s story was an incredible one (something that was untrue and actually contrary to how the story has been considered in the public). Running a story on such thin evidence is wrong for any journalistic agency to do, regardless of political affiliation or otherwise. Not only did OAN take this story and run it without any verification of the facts, yet the continued on a mission to try and discredit every allegation, every accuser, and promote Roy Moore’s platform and the entire debate around Moore’s allegations as being a conspiracy; this included trying to link a witness to drug trafficking, calling Moore’s opponent a “fascist”, smearing an accuser for their violent history, claiming a piece of written material was false based upon body language, and even airing a documentary that defended the senatorial candidate.
Sometime in 2018 (exact dates are unclear), OAN reported on former President Obama’s July visit to South Africa while making the claim that the United Kingdom and the U.S. were silent on the genocide of white people in South Africa and making the claim that Obama’s speech was supportive of such actions. Naturally, Obama’s speech makes no mention of support for the genocide of white people in Africa and many of the articles that revolve around white genocide in South Africa are wildly misquoting statistics, exaggerating certain stories, and many of the evidence for such action is not supported by legitimate data.
In another example of how OAN’s reporters and journalists have pushed or advocated for conspiracy theories, The Daily Beast reported on Donald Trump Jr.’s liking of a tweet which alleged that anti-Trump sentiment in the aftermath of the Parkland school was an FBI ploy.
Basically, Don Jr. liked a tweet posted by Graham Ledger, OAN’s host of probably one of their more popular shows The Daily Ledger, in which Ledger wrote, “Could it be that this student is running cover for his dad who Works as an FBI agent at the Miami field office Which botched tracking down the Man behind the Valentine day massacre? Just wondering.
Just connecting some dots”. The evidence here to support this theory is minimal and circumstantial, being a very thin connection and requiring a suspension of disbelief and an endorsement of a wide anti-Trump conspiracy within the Department of Justice, something that no jury in a criminal case would (or should, for that matter) endorse.
NewsGuard Technologies, a browser extension that has the purpose of monitoring news sites for fake news, provides their own analysis of OAN, stating:
“…a May 2019 article, headlined “Trump Admin. To Relocate 225K Illegal Aliens Around Country,” cited an incorrect statistic about undocumented immigrants. In an embedded video, an OAN host stated, without providing a source, that “over 90 percent of illegal aliens never return for their court dates [for asylum or deportation cases], and simply disappear into the country.”
Fact-checking website PolitiFact found this claim to be false, citing data from the U.S. Department of Justice indicating that during the fiscal year that ended of Sept. 30, 2017, 28 percent of undocumented immigrants were not present for their court hearings. During a five-year period ending in September 2017, the data showed, 23 percent of undocumented immigrants did not show up for their court dates. A NewsGuard review of the federal data confirmed these findings.
A March 2019 article, headlined “WATCH: Illegal Aliens Responsible for More Crime Than American Citizens,” state’s that “criminal aliens are not only costing American taxpayers – they’re also costing American lives.” The article includes an embedded video in which the correspondent stated that “statistics from the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Justice reveal these aliens are much more violent and commit crimes at a much higher rate than native-born Americans.”
GAO and Department of Justice reports reviewed by NewsGuard refute this assertion, indicating that undocumented immigrants do not commit a disproportionate number of crimes. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR have also reported that undocumented immigrants are less likely than citizens to commit crimes, citing sources including census data, figures from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, statistics released by the Texas Department of Public Safety, and numerous articles published in academic journals. A March 2019 Cato Institute report, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau, also showed that illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. “Recent peer-reviewed empirical studies have found no link between violent crime and illegal immigration, and a negative relationship between the number of illegal immigrants and most types of nonviolent crime,” the report from the libertarian think tank concluded.
The same OAN video stated: “According to the FBI, from 2005-2008, there were over 67,000 total murders committed in the U.S. Illegal aliens were responsible for 25,000 of those murders, meaning that in that timeframe, illegals committed nearly half the murders in the United States.” The 25,000 figure appears to be drawn from a 2011 GAO report on non-U.S. citizens who have committed crimes. However, the 25,064 arrests of non-U.S. citizens for homicide included in that report covered an almost 55-year period, from August 1955 through April 2010, not the 2005 to 2008 timeframe stated in the OAN video. According to a June 2018 report from the Cato Institute, if all of the 25,064 non-U.S. citizens arrested for homicide in that 55-year period were convicted, they would have accounted for 2.7 percent of all murders in the U.S. during that time period – so it is baseless to claim that “illegals committed nearly half the murders in the United States.”
The site has also promoted a conspiracy theory about the death of Seth Rich, a Democratic Party staffer who was shot on the street in Washington in July 2016, Rich’s death spawned a conspiracy theory that he was the source of internal Democratic National Committee emails that that were published by WikiLeaks and was murdered because of that.
In a series of articles in 2017, OAN touted its effort to bring viewers “the real story behind the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich,” adding that “the facts” about Rich’s death “don’t add up.” A video posted on the site in July 2017 began with a claim that “this report presents facts not covered by the mainstream media,” suggesting that the political establishment was conspiring to cover up Rich’s killing. “Numerous reports and firsthand accounts have suggested that Seth Rich was disenchanted with the Democratic Party, and was working to expose corruption that went to the highest levels of the DNC,” the video stated. It did not specify its sources for these claims. In a May 2017 video, OAN offered a $100,000 reward “for any information that leads to the arrest of a suspect in the case.”
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have refuted the claim that Rich’s death was somehow connected to WikiLeaks’ publishing of damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Washington police said the murder occurred during an attempted robbery. The claim was also discredited in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which stated that WikiLeaks had “implied falsely” that Rich “had been the source of the stolen DNC emails,” when the real source was a group of Russian hackers.
OAN has published numerous articles and videos relating to Alabama Judge Roy Moore’s unsuccessful 2017 U.S. Senate run that included false claims. For example, after nine women came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore, OAN posted a video in November 2016 that attempted to discredit the allegations by saying that Moore had made a “potentially powerful enemy” by once ruling against a man named Richard Hagedorn in a court case. According to the video, Hagedorn’s brother is “a longtime at the Washington Post,” which first reported the allegations against Moore. This “coincidence,” the OAN anchor claimed, “throws the entire case into question.”
David Hagedorn, Richard Hagedorn’s brother, is a good columnist at The Post, according to his LinkedIn profile, not a “longtime editor.” Moreover, the OAN video provided no evidence that Hagedorn was involved in The Post’s reporting or otherwise connected to the allegations.
In December 2017, an article on OAN.com declared before the polls in Alabama had closed that Moore had won the race, based on what the network called its own “unofficial polling.” Moore lost the race to Democrat Doug Jones by two percentage points. The article was removed from the site soon after publication…Moreover, news coverage on the site is often infused with opinion.
For example, a story from May 2019 about the introduction of an “adversary source” for the SAT test – a number that takes into consideration a student’s socioeconomic background – refers to the measure as “academic socialism”
The analysis by NewsGuard does bring up a series of interesting points however, involving Russian interference and the site’s skeptical connections to Russian intelligence and disinformation operations. In this additional analysis:
OAN also employs a reporter who simultaneously writes for the Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik, according to a July 2019 report in The Daily Beast. Kristian Rouz has covered U.S. politics for OAN since August 2017, the report stated, while also working for Sputnik. A Google search shows Sputnik has posted some 300 stories by Rouz, mostly regarding business news, since 2015. OAN segments featuring Rouz do not disclose his work for Sputnik.
OAN videos featuring Rouz have spread false stories also pushed by Russian state-media. In a March 2018 OAN video, Rouz claims that “white genocide” is occurring in South Africa. Multiple human rights organizations have stated that reports about the genocide of white farmers in South Africa are untrue. Fact-finding group Africa Check spoke with Benjamin Goldsmith, a researcher at The Atrocity Forecasting Project, a genocide-prevention organization based at Australian National University. Goldsmith said that South Africa is “not at high risk of the onset of genocidal violence, and has not been at high risk in recent years, either.” Twitter accounts linekd [sic] to Russia have helped to amplify the white-genocide conspiracy theory, according to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.
In addition, a September 2018 OAN video featuring Rouz states that Russia was not responsible for the March 2018 poisoning in Britain of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia Skripal. In September 2018, the United Kingdom charged two Russian men with attempted murder. Then-Prime Minister Theresa May said in a statement that “the two individuals…are officers from the Russian military intelligence service.” The OAN video calls May’s statement “inaccurate,” and cites claims made by “independent Russian media” that the country’s intelligence service is not responsible for the attack.
The Daily Beast reported on these speculations too, writing:
On Wednesday [OAN] aired a segment claiming to reveal that dozens of members of the Syrian Civil Defense, a humanitarian group known as the White Helmets, have confessed to faking chemical weapons attacks in Syria to frame Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator propped up by Putin. “At least 40 members of the terrorist-linked White Helmets have admitted they staged fake chemical attacks to provoke retaliation against the Syrian Government,” began the report by [OAN] correspondent Pearson Sharp. “Members of the group, who won an Oscar for their Netflix documentary, came out in recent interviews for a study presented to the United Nations and confessed they had in fact faked the attacks.” This cable news smear traces directly to a frenzied disinformation campaign by Russia aimed at linking the White Helmets to a broad range of wrongdoing: things like running a black market in human organs, colluding with terrorists and faking Assad’s chemical weapons attacks.
Moscow has been relentless in pushing these claims, tirelessly falsifying videos and photographs, creating phony news outlets and fake think tanks to do so. Some of the same GRU officers involved in the 2016 election interference created fake freelance journalists to pitch stories smearing the White Helmets to legitimate news outlets… Moscow’s latest disinformation blitz is all about a report produced by the “Foundation for the Study of Democracy”, a Russian NGO headed by one Maxim Grigoriev.
On April 25, Russian diplomats brought Grigoriev into the UN, where he presented his report in a a [sic] plenary room in the basement. Then they took him to Washington, D.C. for a press conference at the Russian embassy four days later. In Wednesday’s segment, [OAN] correspondent Pearson Sharp mentions the UN briefing for institutional gravitas, but doesn’t mention which country brought Grigoriev into the room. And despite Moscow’s obvious self-interest in burnishing Assad’s image, he doesn’t disclose the Kremlin’s midwifing of the report at all, nor that the Foundation for the Study of Democracy is a Russian institution.
Sharp defended those omissions in an email exchange with The Daily Beast, writing that “the veracity of Grigoriev report doesn’t hinge on the fact that he’s Russian, and has worked with the Russian government. It hinges on the evidence of the report.” Sharp’s news segment does find time to refer to the White Helmets—parenthetically, as though tossing out a well-known fact—as “terrorist-linked” and “terrorist sympathizers,” pulling acontinuing thread in Russia’s disinformation that some experts think is intended to brand the Syrian rescue workers as legitimate military targets. Moscow’s latest disinformation blitz is all about a report produced by the “Foundation for the Study of Democracy”, a Russian NGO headed by one Maxim Grigoriev. On April 25, Russian diplomats brought Grigoriev into the UN, where he presented his report in a a [sic] plenary room in the basement.
Then they took him to Washington, D.C. for a press conference at the Russian embassy four days later. In Wednesday’s segment, [OAN] correspondent Pearson Sharp mentions the UN briefing for institutional gravitas, but doesn’t mention which country brought Grigoriev into the room. And despite Moscow’s obvious self-interest in burnishing Assad’s image, he doesn’t disclose the Kremlin’s midwifing of the report at all, nor that the Foundation for the Study of Democracy is a Russian institution. Sharp defended those omissions in an email exchange with The Daily Beast, writing that “the veracity of Grigoriev report doesn’t hinge on the fact that he’s Russian, and has worked with the Russian government. It hinges on the evidence of the report.” Sharp’s news segment does find time to refer to the White Helmets—parenthetically, as though tossing out a well-known fact—as “terrorist-linked” and “terrorist sympathizers,” pulling a continuing thread in Russia’s disinformation that some experts think is intended to brand the Syrian rescue workers as legitimate military targets.
Now, I do not think that OAN is engaged in a Russian disinformation operation. The Daily Beast article also interviewed Clint Watts, a former U.S. Army Infantry officer and FBI Special Agent who is something of an expert on misinformation and Russian Information Warfare (IW) tactics, who states, “[there’s enormous value to Moscow in getting its fake White Helmets news repeated in any American newscast] It’s source laundering. Then they can recirculate the story as an organic American story, and that could travel further than if it’s only on RT and Sputnik… The more places it shows up the more it looks like it’s not a single source origin story”. Quite simply, OAN isn’t pushing these kinds of stories because they are assisting in a larger geopolitical goal of advancing Russian interests, but rather because they give the site ample ammunition to use against the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, and support President Trump and his policies.
Not only this, but many of the commentators have shoddy backgrounds in terms of reporting or politics and have endorsed conspiracy theories that do not have sufficient evidence to back it up. For example, “In 2018, well after the debunking of Pizzagate – the allegation that Hillary Clinton and a secret cabal were running a pedophile ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant – the network hired one of Pizzagate’s boosters, Jack Posobiec, as an on-air correspondent”. Posobiec also has been involved in some questionable newscasts, including one in which he interviewed, “a conservative social media analyst,” only for it later to come out that the person interviewed (a Dennis F. Charles) was appearing under a pseudonym and that the segment which was broadcast, “on OANN[sic] did not disclose this to viewers, contrary to standard journalistic practices”.
Furthermore, Posobiec was a former reporter for Rebel News, a far-right Canadian news website, who later forced the website to admit, “that its former Washington correspondent [Posobiec] plagiarized the work of an extreme-right American activist [Jason Kessler] in one of his videos while still with the Canadian-based alt-right media outlet,” with some of the videos being word for word what Kessler had said (Posobiec alleged he had permission from Kessler’s editor). Posobiec also, during an anti-Trump march a week after the 2016 election, planted a sign which read “Rape Melania” in the march, with some of Trump’s supporters taking this, “as confirmation that the passionate national opposition to the president-elect was ultimately anarchic and violent”.
I think it is fair to say that Posobiec did this to further public support for the new president-elect and sow distaste in the public for leftist groups against the president, but I also argue that it could be that Posobiec did this in order to allow himself something to write about and gain his site more revenue and garner more recognition for himself. The reporter that OAN has hired has a history of manufacturing news for a specific political goal and for plagiarizing content from others. This is not at all someone who should be a trusted source of information nor allowed to be a journalist for any organization that has any self-respect or respect for the field of journalism.
Not only this, but they also have as a correspondent, “Larry Johnson… a former CIA officer… [who repeated a claim] that the UK intelligence assisted the Obama administration in spying on the Trump campaign,” which was later retweeted by Trump. There is simply no evidence to support such a theory, nor is Johnson really the most credible source as he was previously involved in alleging that a tape of Michelle Obama using the word “whitey” at Jeremiah Wright’s church; no such tape was ever released and many regard this as a hoax. He also made allegations that John Kerry had raped a Vietnamese woman while utilizing video from The Dick Cavett Show which he had edited and doctored. Johnson had previously spread this claim on RT, Russia’s state-sponsored news agency. Furthermore, it is worth noting that Johnson’s government career appears to have been somewhat lackluster having “followed four years as a CIA analyst with four years at the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism”, serving from 1985 to 1993, his experience being rather dated in a highly current business.
For a week in 2015, OAN allowed Sarah Palin to guest host their show On Point. A very well-known populist, conservative figure in recent American politics, she alleged that, in response to ESPN’s firing of Curt Schilling for a (later deleted) tweet and Facebook post, ESPN was “swallowing ISIS propaganda” by deleting a true statistic. The tweet Schilling made stated, “It’s said only 5-10% of Muslims are extremists. In 1940, only 7% of Germans were Nazis. How’d that go?”. PolitiFact rated this claim “Mostly False” and after discussing this statistic with historians on Nazi Germany and the Nazi Party, they state:
“Schilling tweeted that in 1940 only 7 percent of Germans were Nazis. That figure is too low. It might be close for the more limited fraction of Nazi supporters who formally joined the party, but it ignores the Nazis’ electoral domination in 1932 and the popularity that came after the first military victories in 1939. The vote results and the assessment of the experts we reached point to a much larger figure in the range of 35 percent. That’s five times larger than the figure in the tweet”
Another important figure within OAN is Chanel Rion, a correspondent with the news organization and the organization’s White House correspondent. In the past, she has asked “hard-hitting” questions of the President, which this White House Press room dialogue between Rion and Trump encapsulates:
[in discussing the President’s usage of “the Chinese virus” when referring to SARS-CoV-2)
RION: Do you consider the term Chinese food Racist? Because it’s food that originates in China?
TRUMP: No, I don’t think its racist.
RION: On that note, major left-wing news media, even in this room, have teamed up with Chinese Communist Party narratives and they’re claiming you are racist for making these claims about Chinese virus. Is it alarming that major media players, just to oppose you, are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals, and Latin gangs and cartels and they work right here out the White House with direct access to you and your team?
This is certainly an extremely biased question and is built upon one’s bias towards the mainstream media and a more liberal point of view. Having these questions being asked, which are blatantly designed to protect the president and his actions, is improper in my opinion as it is not the media’s job to be beholden to any one group, politician, ideology, or party; their job is to report, as unbiasedly as possible, the events occurring domestically, internationally, economically, politically, and socially. OAN’s questions towards the President in this regard do not exhibit that and does the exact opposite.
Rion has also been one to give into conspiracy theories. For example, in a special which aired on the 14th and 15th of March, 2020 titled Exposing China’s Coronavirus: The Fears, The Lies, and The Unknown, Rion interviews Greg Rubini, “a popular contributor in QAnon circles” who suggested, “that the novel coronavirus “was GENETICALLY ENGINEERED[sic] as a Bio-Weapon at the Univ. of North Carolina BSL-3 Lab.” He has also said that it was spread from North Carolina to China, Italy, and elsewhere in the United States by the “Deep State” in a plot “to destroy the Trump economy”…Rubini has repeatedly accused Fauci of being behind the pandemic as a tool of the “deep state.” Along those lines, he has also pointed the finger at former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden”. Rion endorses this line of thinking multiple times in the special and cites experts for her claims, Rubini among them.
Not only has Rion endorsed conspiracy theories surrounding the 2019 Coronavirus outbreak, but she has also endorsed Seth Rich conspiracy theories, promoted the book of an author who previously wrote a text denying the Jewish Holocaust, and has made cartoons that are somewhat transphobic and engages in Islamophobia. She also, “claimed that former FBI lawyer Lisa Page had an affair with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe,” which was “vaguely sourced” and eventually retracted while also heading an OAN special which, “takes Giuliani and his allies at their word that Trump did nothing wrong by pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden and his family”. She also claims to be a published author, but, “A Wonkette investigation…turned up no reference to the books outside Rion’s own website and no evidence anywhere that the books are for sale or actually exist”. More recently too, Chanel has become vocal in promoting theories about former U.S. House of Representatives for Florida’s 1st District and MSNBC host, Joe Scarborough, and his involvement in an aide’s death in 2001; Naturally, there is no evidence to back up any of the claims that Scarborough was involved, yet this has not stopped the President nor supporters of him from trying to make connections.
Rion also, “violated social distancing guidelines as she stepped forward and stood close to Alcindor [PBS Newshour’s White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor] to ask a question… Rion shouldn’t have been at the briefing on that April day. She didn’t have a seat and her network had been booted from the briefing rotation — a move that has drawn the ire of OAN”, something that is putting the medical safety of literally everyone else in a given room at risk. It should also be noted that she did not stop coming to the briefing room as she returned a few days later despite not having a formal seat and again violated member’s space.
So, who we have as the White House correspondent is a reporter who bases a story on little information, has engaged in producing content that is inflammatory and, I would argue, hateful, takes company with inherently biased individuals or individuals whose credentials are subpar and unable to be verified, supports theories that are baseless and contrary to the evidence, and consistently violates others’ public safety and disregards rulings by official agencies. So, considering the type of content that OAN publishes and the other correspondents and reporters that are employed, it seems to be line with the quality and veracity that most stories encompass.
OAN itself, broadly, has engaged in conspiracy theory promulgation with Herring Networks, Inc. (OAN’s parent company), “offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a suspect in former DNC staffer Seth Rich’s murder case”.
Behind the Scenes
OAN has been around for some time, as previously mentioned, before President Trump even began his 2016 Presidential Campaign.
The site is owned by Herring Networks, Inc. and was officially launched on the 4th of July, 2013. Herring Networks, Inc. is owned by Robert Herring, “a California businessman who made his fortune in the technology industry”. According to The Atlantic, which has a reported on the history of OAN:
“Robert built his fortune as a manufacturer of circuit boards, cashing out of two companies in 2000 with $122 million. He and Charles [his son] broke into television in 2004 with WealthTV, now known as AWE (A Wealth of Entertainment), a cable channel that would feature shows such as Cheese Chasers and Dream Cruises. Robert also started giving money to conservative causes. In 2005, he made news when he offered $1 million to the husband of Terri Schiavo—a young woman who spent years in a vegetative state as her husband and parents fought in court over whether to end her life—if he agreed to keep her on life support. (He declined the offer.) When Robert and his son decided that Fox News had gotten too soft, too centrist, they launched One America to compete with it”
Not only this but it was uncovered in October of 2021 that AT&T, the largest telecommunications company in the world, helped make OAN attractive to the public and assisted in its’ growth. Reuters, examining court documents which includes sworn testimony from Robert Herring, reported that, in a 2019 deposition, Herring stated, “They [AT&T] told us they wanted a conservative network…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”.
While AT&T denied they had a financial interest in OAN or had funded them, court records showed “AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show [with] Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue [coming] from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV” and Herring testified that AT&T provided “monthly fees…[totaling] about $57 million” over a five-year period.
While this in and of itself is not strictly important in the factual veracity of OAN, this points to a much larger issue within misinformation. It is clear, through these court documents and sworn testimony, that AT&T seemingly funded and promoted OAN, keeping them afloat through financial hardship. Throughout this relationship, OAN damaged America by promoting conspiracy upon conspiracy and corrupting the minds of many Americans while distorting the truth of any given situation and further increasing domestic strife. This instance demands and necessitates that larger and more powerful companies, especially those in the telecom industry (like Comcast, Walt Disney, Sony, and Fox) need to take a more active stand against misinformation and that, while they may not have a legal obligation, they most certainly have a moral and ethical obligation.
Continuing on with the more strict analysis, however, The Daily Beast was also able to obtain video of a speech Robert Herring gave before CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in which the multimillionaire details his motivations, stating:
“It is getting really hard to find just the reliable, credible, fact-based news with substance. The second component is to provide a platform where more voices can be heard, voices that are ignored, libertarian and conservative voices… Fox is a great platform. A lot of people like it, it gets outstanding ratings. There is nothing wrong with Fox. The problem is that if you take the channel lineup, the sources of national news tend to lean to the left…and all we have is Fox. With only one outlet, if you happen to be an independent or a libertarian, or you are on the outside, you only have one platform right now, which is Fox. There just isn’t enough time in the day to have those voices heard. I see us as opening up another front, another platform…Cable networks, many of them, have blurred the line between delivering the news and information and delivering the personal views of the host. Nothing wrong with either one, but we just believe that they should be separated, and we are going to do that”
So, Herring’s stated goal is to have a news organization that provides an independent, libertarian, and conservative viewpoint while focusing on issues important to those bases and providing information and news in a format that is not beholden to any personal viewpoint of individual hosts or creators. However, the big question here is, does OAN do that? Do they provide a voice to these other sectors that, they see, are not as widely represented in the media and try not to engage in personal biases or sentiments?
To put it simply, OAN does not live up to this mission statement in any way whatsoever.
In a Business Insider article, one can see the effect that Herring has upon the media organization and how much of a grip he has on content and format. They write, “Robert Herring Sr. makes a point to announce on Twitter the live and uninterrupted broadcasts that have included Robert Mueller’s hearing, Trumps 2020 election announcement, and appearances in cities devastated by mass shootings… [he alleges] the move has nothing to do with the president’s politics, but was merely “a function of the news”.
However, what is interesting about this is that, in a 2017 investigative piece on OAN by the Washington Post, former OAN journalists shared emails detailing how Herring was overbearing and inflected his own personal opinions into broadcasts. To quote:
Early one morning in March 2016, Herring emailed producers with a directive, two hours before former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was to denounce Trump as “very, very not smart”: “Do not carry the Romney speech live,” Herring wrote. “Romney has no standing. . . . He is a loser. We will let the people decide.”
“The owner of the company became the de facto news director,” said a former OAN producer who quit because the coverage of Trump had become “too slanted.” “He has a ton of influence over every aspect of the newscast. He has stories written on his whim.” “We started out with the premise of news straight down the middle,” said Cassie Leuffen, an anchor at OAN from its birth through the 2016 election. “But the bias does reveal itself in the story selection. The owner really felt this was what was needed. He saw the popularity of Trump before almost anybody, and Trump became our bread and butter.”
Christopher Wood, one of OAN’s first news writers, recalled, “We’d have staff meetings on Wednesdays, and Mr. H. would say he wanted more stories from Breitbart, the Drudge Report and other conservative sites. It was his way or no way.
“We should ALWAYS take the trump speeches live in their entirety,” executive producer Lindsay Oakley wrote to her staff early in the campaign. “I don’t want producers’ personal feelings getting in the way of the news content we provide. Trump is being treated unfairly by the mainstream media and we need to provide the other side. . . . Not to mention we have loyal viewers that tune in specifically to see the Trump speeches live because no one else carries them. We also see some of our highest ratings during the Trump speeches.”… Her email warned producers that failing to put Trump speeches on the air “will result in a written warning/write-up from here on out.”
OAN employees recounted receiving reprimands signed by Robert Herring or being called into his office to be dressed down for “insubordination” when they ran stories he disapproved of.
“Please please please avoid ferguson stories!!!” Oakley wrote after OAN aired a report on Ferguson, Mo.’s battle with the Justice Department over reforms to the city’s police and court systems following an officer’s shooting of an unarmed black man. A story that aired three times on the channel “made police look bad and Mr. H. has told all of us not to do that. Please just avoid ferguson stories all together.”
Early hire Christopher Wood said he was fired in October 2015 after he decided to lead off a newscast with excerpts from an interview that the family of Michael Brown, the victim in the Ferguson shooting, gave to another network. “That was my downfall,” Wood said. “I got a very, very angry email from Mr. H. saying he wanted the story pulled and we weren’t to run it again.”
OAN staffers complained to Herring when the channel produced and aired a promotional spot that depicted a black police dispatcher refusing to send help to a white caller whose house was under attack. When employees called the spot racially incendiary, Herring agreed to take it off the air, but it remains on OAN’s YouTube channel, where it has attracted more than a million viewings.
Herring pushed stories about Planned Parenthood’s purported promotion of abortion that he’d seen on CNS News, a conservative site. He passed on to OAN producers a report that Hillary Clinton was ending her campaign because of “a brain tumor found during my recent colonoscopy,” but Herring warned producers not to run the story “until you fact check twice.”
Herring often said OAN’s purpose was to give viewers the news they needed to make educated choices. But he increasingly directed the newsroom to cover stories that reflected his personal views, employees said. For example, producers said, Herring ordered that OAN minimize coverage of Pope Francis’s U.S. visit in 2015 because the pope had urged comprehensive action against climate change.
Another article, this one from The Daily Beast, details how reporters and journalists functioned under Herring, writing:
The Daily Beast spoke with four former [OAN] employees—three anchors and a writer, all of whom were experienced journalists when they started at the network’s headquarters on the northern edge of San Diego, California. Some of them were at [OAN] long enough to remember a time when they found much to admire in the network’s news coverage, particularly its focus on the kind of international stories neglected by CNN and Fox News.
But over time, Herring asserted increasingly direct control over the newsroom’s coverage. The scripts landing on the anchor desk became more and more politically skewed, while Herring became correspondingly less tolerant of pushback. When interviewing conservatives, “they would tell me what questions I wasn’t allowed to ask,” said one anchor. “I’d ask anyway and they’d call me into the office and complain.” And it became common for Herring to emerge from his upstairs office with some piece of news he’d picked up from a fringe website like Infowars or Gateway Pundit, insisting that [OAN] put it on the air.
A second former [OAN] anchor confirmed this account. “One of the things I did when I was there is go through all these conspiracies he was reading on crazy blog sites and tell him why we can’t report it,” the second anchor told the Daily Beast. “It was just an old guy with a bunch of conspiracy theory stories and we had to write it,” said a third former anchor. “They were known as ‘H stories.’ If there was story that was unbelievably ridiculous, it was an H story.”
All three anchors eventually quit.Having a news agency carry this kind of bias in reporting and refusing to air a presidential nominee’s speech is certainly a personal opinion, one that these selected journalists and producers despised. Comparing Herring’s actions to his initial statement at CPAC, it is clear that he has allowed his own internal bias and personal opinion to inflect newscasts and has strayed far from what he initially claimed.
As far as the claims of a hostile work environment go, there are also many behind the scenes rifts that play into the conservative and conspiracy laden reporting cycle. In early January of 2020, a case involving a former producer at OAN went underway in the San Diego Superior Court; the case involves Jonathan Harris, a former OAN production assistant, who alleges, “he was harassed based on his African-American race and then retaliated against when he complained”. The article further explains;
Harris was hired in 2014 first as a production assistant for the news desk, then as a booking producer for “The Daily Ledger,” an evening opinion show hosted by its namesake, a longtime San Diego news anchor and television personality. Part of Harris’ job included discussing potential topics for future shows, coordinating guests and posting to the show’s social media accounts… Harris claims that he — the only African-American present at the show’s planning meetings — was regularly berated, demeaned and verbally abused on account of his liberal views and his perspectives as an African-American male…
A breaking point in Harris’ and Ledger’s professional relationship came during a debate about airing a segment on the removal of certain Confederate monuments. Afterward, Harris sent an official racial discrimination complaint to Herring Sr. Herring Sr. was also called out in the complaint. In it, Harris noted that prior conversations he’d had with Herring Sr. about race left him concerned that the complaint wouldn’t be taken seriously, or that he’d be retaliated against.
Harris was interviewed about the allegations the next day by management, and it was agreed that he would leave Ledger’s staff and move into a different position. Harris moved his computer to a cubicle on another floor — next to Herring Sr.’s office — but not before deleting several documents from his desktop. The documents were for his personal use to help him with the show, such as templates to input biographical information for appearing guests, as well as show notes from old episodes, Engelman told the jury. He did not think they were needed any more in his new role, and any documents that would be of use to future shows were still in a shared drive accessible to the whole staff, she said.
Another producer complained later that day that Harris had deleted important documents needed to run the show. After an argument in Herring’s office, Harris was fired. Herring Sr. testified about that final confrontation. He said he was concerned by the complaining producer’s accusations but did not independently investigate which files were actually deleted or determine their importance to the show.
The argument moved from Herring Sr.’s office to Harris’ new cubicle nearby. He said Harris appeared to be deleting more items on the computer. Herring Sr. said he tried to block Harris’ access to the computer with his elbow, and Harris physically pushed back. The CEO then unplugged the machine. That’s when he fired Harris, Herring Sr. said.
The case eventually went to a jury who ruled in favor of Jonathan Harris, “[awarding him] $ 290,000 in damages… Harris claimed he was fired because of his race and was harassed at OANN for his race and his left-leaning political views. The San Diego Superior Court jury did not find that Harris was fired because of his race but concluded that Harris’ complaint about race-based harassment motivated his dismissal. The jury also found that [OAN] didn’t “take all reasonable steps to prevent the harassment, or discrimination, or retaliation” against Harris and said Ledger and the network engaged in “conduct with malice, oppression or fraud” toward the former employee”. Certainly, what abounds at OAN beyond conspiracies and faulty reporting is a hostile work environment complete with bouts of rage, a hyper Conservative agenda, and an absolute loyalty to the whims of old conservatives.
What is very interesting about Robert Herring though is his own connection to Russia. The Post article notes that after Herring sold his company in 2001, “he retired and met a woman in Russia who became his third wife”. This is quite interesting because it is very well-known that many of the allegations run by news agencies, pushed by the President, and run by OAN themselves are stories that have been created or engineered by Russian intelligence operatives and organized trolls (e.g. Seth Rich was murdered, Pizzagate, Operation Jade Helm, etc.). A few of the articles I have previously mentioned touch on this issue as well.
In the Daily Beast’s interview with one disaffected producer, Ernest Campbell, he mentions just how much Russia plays a role in stories and news production at the network. In describing his first day at the office, being showed around by a staffer, the staffer quipped, “Yeah, we like Russia here”. As the piece later notes, “But Campbell couldn’t stomach [OAN’s] support for Russian propaganda, he said, and finally walked away after four months. “If you noticed the far right wing likes Russia,” he said. “Why? Because Russia’s an all-white country that suppresses Muslims and all that kind of stuff. They wish America was like that, so it all makes sense.” “Mr. Herring just genuinely is kind of enamored of Putin,” another former staffer said. “He thinks that Putin is a strong guy who does whatever he wants. Mr. Herring will get into the celebrity status of wealthy powerful men, and I think Putin is one of them”.
In the Post’s article on the network, they interview others formerly associated with OAN who detail similar items, documenting, “Producers said Herring repeatedly urged against running stories critical of Russia. (Herring’s online streaming company, KlowdTV, features a package offering just Herring’s own channels and RT. Another package adds Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and Newsmax.) “Wouldn’t it be better if we started working with Russia, than to keep blaming them for everything,” Herring tweeted in October. “Lift sanctions, no NATO on their borders”. One of the anonymous, former OAN staffers also agreed with his fellow staffer’s assertion in the Daily Beast article about Herring, saying, “[OAN is] Robert Herring’s “way to hobnob with political figures and maybe have some political influence. This is one man’s hobby”. I agree with what those former employees say about OAN and their reporting on certain issues.
As well, Herring himself is not above running stories or pushing content that is faulty or inaccurate.
As The Atlantic article detailed, “On April 20, he posted about hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug that Trump has touted as a cure for COVID-19—and now claims to have taken himself—despite the lack of evidence that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for the coronavirus and the emerging evidence that it may cause harm,” with Herring writing that people have taken the drug and become 100% cured and that Trump was the first to detail the wonders and the drug itself to the public. The article notes again, “Not a word of this tweet is accurate, not even the part about Trump being the first to tell us about the drug. Robert just lobbed it out there…”. Also noted in the article was the network’s ratings system and availability in the household. In the aforementioned Business Insider article, the author writes, “As of June 2019, the network told The Guardian it has 35 million subscribers and around 150,000 to half a million viewers”. The Atlantic article goes more in depth, writing:
“…only a smattering of U.S. cable operators carry OAN, representing a potential pool of about 35 million households, or less than a third of the total U.S. television audience. The network’s precise viewership remains a mystery. The Herrings don’t participate in Nielsen surveys and have declined to share subscriber data. But according to the scant available data from Comscore and conversations with industry analysts, at least 34.5 million of those households are not watching OAN. The more you search for evidence of OAN viewers, in fact, the less they seem to exist. “If you look at the constellation of sources around the 2020 election, OAN registers but it doesn’t make the top thousand,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a Web 2.0 pioneer and media and public-policy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “That surprised me … but it seems like they’re really focused on being a TV network rather than a multimedia platform.” Indeed, most of the segments on OAN’s YouTube page have just a few thousand views. OAN often gets compared to Breitbart News, but it exemplifies a reversal of Brietbart’s strategy under Steve Bannon, which sought to leverage social media aggressively. One America may be relatively new, but it seems almost pre-web”
As well, the Business Insider article adds, “The channel is carried on providers like DirecTV and Verizon, but The Daily Beast reported Nielsen had it rated “somewhere below the Tennis channel” in May 2019”. The NY Daily News, however, notes that OAN utilizes data from Rentrak (now acquired by comScore), which has a much different methodology, primarily utilizing a less accurate method of gathering demographics.
For a clearer picture of what OAN’s viewership and subscription measurements look like, CNN describes this in their article, writing:
“The network doesn’t subscribe to Nielsen Media Research, which is the industry standard for measuring television audiences. But in the spring of 2019, Nielsen Media Research briefly measured OAN’s audience in metered markets, which represent the country’s biggest metro areas. In those markets, OAN averaged only 14,000 total viewers from April 1, 2019, to June 11, 2019. Its chief rival, Fox News, averaged 631,000 viewers in the same markets during the same time period. MSNBC averaged 558,000 viewers, and CNN averaged 341,000 viewers. Online, the picture isn’t much better for OAN. According to Comscore, a firm that measures web traffic, OAN had only 33,300 average daily visitors in March, the latest month for which data is available. For context, Fox News had 135 million unique U.S. visitors in March and CNN had 184 million”
While the network’s true number of viewers is unknown, it is likely and logical, based upon the evidence provided, to believe that OAN is not exactly gathering information that is the most accurate in regards to their subscriptions or is exaggerating the amount of viewers they have.
Conclusion
So, the picture that emerges behind the scenes of OAN is of a highly conflicted, severely underpaid, and overworked staff that retains only those players who are truly, fully, and 100% committed to the Conservative cause. This is seemingly backed up by those reporters who left the network and detailed the trials at OAN to the journalists they spoke with at the Post, who reported, “To observers on the right and left alike, OAN’s chief goal seems to be to press the conservative cause. “Obviously, they’re not in it for the money, because they’re bleeding money,” said Armstrong Williams, the conservative commentator and TV station owner, who gave the Herrings advice as they were launching OAN. “They’re believers; they care about balancing the media. I saw them as good guys, a little green, without a full idea of what this was going to cost. It’s amazing they’re still up and running”.
This, in my mind, is what OAN and Robert Herring are getting at. It is not because of money that OAN is engaging in this. As the Post article also details, “Charles Herring won’t say how much, if any, profit OAN makes. He said the family company has been in the black since 2009. “We don’t make a lot of money…”. The entire goal is not profit, but instead is to provide an outlet for the political ideas and theories based upon the biases and stereotypes of its founder, Robert Herring. The intent is not true political discourse or unbiased reporting on domestic politics or current events integral to American society, but to support one of the most conservative presidencies in U.S. political history and to allow Herring the ability to gain more influential partners in the political arena, both foreign and domestic.
The problems that OAN has are serious and are an extreme detriment to important political discussions and has a serious effect upon the conduct of all forms of American policy due to the fact that many Republican politicians and the President himself embrace the network and the network’s content. To fully describe the effect this type of content production and reporting can have upon American society, I feel it appropriate to quote the final paragraphs of CNN’s article:
Trump’s promotion of the channel, which occurs as he simultaneously works to undermine credible news organizations, is cause for alarm, said Phil Napoli, a Duke University professor who specializes in media and democracy and has studied propaganda efforts. That much of it is happening during a public health crisis is especially troubling, Napoli said.” The risk is actually physical,” he said, noting that people need accurate and reliable information about the coronavirus.
Napoli said he has never seen a US president promote a network like OAN while launching a sustained assault on credible news organizations.” We would have to start looking to some countries that I wouldn’t classify as democracies for some of these types of things,” he said. Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University history professor and CNN analyst, agreed.
“I haven’t seen anything like this,” he said. “There have obviously been presidents who criticize the press and try to limit their access. Almost every president had some kind of tension with the press and some like Richard Nixon create their own enemies list. FDR used fireside chats as a way to control his message around conservative newspaper publishers. But now we are in a whole different ballgame.”“In the middle of a historic crisis like this, to bolster non-credible news sources while doubling down on his normal attacks is stunning to watch,” Zelizer added. “What’s more is that this crisis is one where information is absolutely essential to the cure. Without facts and figures from legitimate sources we will be treading water for a long time. As the President weakens the institution that can bring us that information, he weakens our collective ability to move back to some sort of normal”
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