Verizon Gives OAN The Axe, Upsetting The Six People Who Still Watch The Channel
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:
Nielsen has #'s for OANN in "metered markets," i.e. the country's biggest metro areas. This spring, in those markets, OANN has been averaging just 14,000 viewers. Fox News: 631,000 viewers in those same markets.
- Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 15, 2019
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.