Verizon Gives OAN The Axe, Upsetting The Six People Who Still Watch The Channel

from the it's-not-censorship,-you're-just-terrible dept

When last we checked in with One America News (OAN), it was trying (with the help of numerous Republican AGs) to pretend that DirecTV’s decision to boot the barely watched conspiracy network from its cable lineup was part of a vast, diabolical cabal to censor conservatives (it wasn’t).

OAN more recently attacked Verizon, the last major cable TV provider willing to host its conspiratorial gibberish. Apparently, an innocuous Verizon website informing its customers that propaganda was a real thing sent the right wing propaganda machine into a bit of a baseless tizzy. In turn, OAN attacked Verizon, accusing it of working to, you guessed it, unfairly censor conservatives.

Attacking the last cable company willing to host OAN’s nonsense… didn’t go so well. Verizon has publicly announced that it’s kicking the channel off of its lineup, effectively putting the final nail in the “news” channel’s coffin. According to Verizon, OAN simply wanted to be paid more than the channel was worth:

“Our negotiation with OAN has been a typical, business-as-usual carriage negotiation like those that routinely happen between content distributors and content providers. These negotiations were focused on economics, as they always are, but OAN failed to agree to fair terms,” a Verizon spokesperson said in a statement.

That leaves just one cable company in the US actually left carrying OAN as part of its cable lineup: General Communications Inc., an Alaska-based cable company with all of 100,000 total paying subscribers. The inevitable outcome of being booted for being terrible will, of course, be played off as “censorship.”

Despite making a lot of headlines for its batshit claims (like the idea COVID was crafted in a North Carolina lab), the news channel never really saw all that many actual viewers. One estimate pegged daily viewership at around 14,000 a few years ago, and that was before the channel got kicked off of DirecTV, its biggest distributor:

To be clear, Verizon, DirecTV, and AT&T shouldn’t be deemed heroic for ditching the channel. They’d be happy to retain the dangerous, conspiracy-theory spewing, fascist propaganda pushing, pseudo-news network if it had been just a little bit more profitable. But the risk to reward ratio of paying for the company’s largely unwatched gibberish simply became untenable.

Numerous reports indicate OAN’s staff are having some unsurprising morale issues. OAN management now hopes to pivot to Internet video, joining the rich competitive field of unhinged engagement trolls hoping to make major bank off of the country’s very broken controversy infotainment machine.

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Companies: oan, oann

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Comments on “Verizon Gives OAN The Axe, Upsetting The Six People Who Still Watch The Channel”

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35 Comments
That One Guy (profile) says:

What they were worth vs what they thought they were worth

Well that’s lucky for OAN, they were just complaining about how terrible Verizon was so they have got to be super stoked that they no longer have to deal with the company.

Ah the schadenfreude of demanding what they thought they were worth only to be told that they were vastly overvaluing themselves and the platform wasn’t interested continuing losing money hosting them.

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Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

At least when Chozen, Hamilton and restless94110 posted, you could see they had some modicum of effort to back up their paragraphs of pearl clutching and outrage on Republicans’ behalf.

This kind of OAN apologism just makes me think the best shitposters they could muster were rejects scraped from the trash heap outside a trailer park.

ECA (profile) says:

IF'

That channel could have connected A-B. NOT A-B-C. They might have had a market.
But when 1 part of a channel declares something, and the next part declares something But in a different way.
It MEANS those watching have to THINK. who, what?? help.

BUT FOX, loves to point fingers at only certain groups. With Cheap simple Explanations. HE DID IT. works every time.

WarioBarker (profile) says:

Apparently, an innocuous Verizon website informing its customers that propaganda was a real thing sent the right wing propaganda machine into a bit of a baseless tizzy. In turn, OAN attacked Verizon, accusing it of working to, you guessed it, unfairly censor conservatives.

“You’re informing customers about propaganda, that means you’re unfairly censoring conservatives!”

According to Verizon, OAN simply wanted to be paid more than the channel was worth[.]

Which is to say, OAN wanted to be paid.

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Lostinlodos (profile) says:

Open letter

Dear OAN:
STELFU!

Seriously!
You have an average daily viewership over 2 million.
You make more money from KlowdTV and Spring than any cable company offered you.
Half of all cable/satellite subscribers in history have cancelled their service.
Your advertising is estimated to bring in 10-25 milPA.

Stop being a crybaby bytch and just keep pumping out content.
Fuck those who cancel you. Fuck those who delete you. Fuck anyone who gets in your way.
Just keep doing your, well, whatever it is you do. Your average railings are better than MSNBC’s best historical hour.

Just move on. Stop acting like a progressive member of congress when you don’t get your tea on time!
You’ll be fine.

SC: LostOne

Postscript—
If you continue to act like a Democrat leader’s gold-spoon-feed child having to wait for 5 seconds for your next truffle, you will turn even the most anti-censorship people against you.

Jim says:

OAN

OAN is a great alternative to all the spin and misinformation you get fed by CNN, MSNBC and the socalled major networks. Verizon and other woke companies should be ashamed and should be bending over backwards to allow OAN’s different perspectives be aired. For example, they were the only network to broadcast some of the state investigation hearings into voter fraud. If you watched any of those for any length of time the fact that the 2020 election was rigged was clear. This isnt coming from OAN but rather the many state representatives holding the hearings. Thank you OAN!!!

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