DirecTV Kicks Right Wing Newsmax Off Its Cable Lineup, Prompting More Baseless GOP Whining About ‘Censorship’

You might recall how struggling satellite TV network DirecTV recently kicked right wing propaganda channel OANN off of its cable lineup because it simply wasn't profitable. That prompted weeks of performative hysteria by the GOP about how they were being unfairly censored," even prompting involvement of numerous Republican AGs who apparently had nothing better to do.

Now DirecTV has decided to kick the slightly less feral right wing propaganda channel Newsmax off of its cable lineup, prompting Newsmax to immediately run news stories" falsely claiming they've been unfairly censored:

To be clear, cable companies will air pretty much any monumental pile of garbage if it makes them money, so the idea that this is anything other than just a boring business decision is idiotic. That didn't stop the House GOP, who immediately proceeded to concoct an elaborate fiction in a letter to DirecTV about how it was part of some nefarious left wing censorship cabal:

It has recently been revealed that Congressional Democrats and the White House coordinated closely with private companies to de-platform, de-monetize, or otherwise limit the reach of viewpoints they oppose and classify them as misinformation,'" the House Republicans wrote. As members of the House Republican Conference, we are deeply concerned about this un-democratic assault on free speech."

The GOP is desperate to protect a propaganda apparatus successfully built over 45 years across AM radio, television, and the Internet. It's what all the phony support for Big Tech antitrust reform" is about. It's what the whining about TikTok is partially about. With an unfavorably saggy demographic shift among young Americans and extremely unpopular policies, propaganda is all the GOP actually has.

DirecTV was quick to issue a statement making it clear they would have kept the channel, but its cost just wasn't worth extending its contract, and that if right wingers want to consume the channel's propaganda they can still happily do so via the Internet:

On multiple occasions, we made it clear to Newsmax that we wanted to continue to offer the network, but ultimately Newsmax's demands for rate increases would have led to significantly higher costs that we would have to pass on to our broad customer base," a DirecTV spokesperson told The Daily Beast shortly after midnight on Wednesday.

Anyone, including our customers, can watch the network for free via NewsmaxTV.com, YouTube.com and on multiple streaming platforms like Amazon Fire TV, Roku and Google Play. We continually evaluate the most relevant programming to provide our customers and expect to fill this available channel with new content."

Of course back when the GOP had something vaguely resembling a consistent ideology, meddling with the business decisions of major companies would have been frowned at. Now that the party has devolved into authoritarian gibberish and endless victimization porn to distract and agitate the base, it's just dumb, performative bullshit, all the way down to bone marrow level.