AT&T wanted OAN to compete with Fox News. It worked too well

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The headline from Reuters — “How AT&T helped build far-right One America News” — is alarming enough. A major corporation, the biggest communications company in the world, has subsidized and is continuing to subsidize propagandists who amplified harmful false facts about Covid-19 and the 2020 presidential election.

The why is a little hard to understand, unless you think like a cable news executive who ultimately wants to maximize profits. We know it’s not because AT&T executives can’t get enough of OAN hosts like Elma Aksalic.

Follow me here: When the telecom giant bought DirecTV in 2015, it did so at a time the satellite TV company didn’t want to allow OAN carriage on its system, the company said. What this essentially means is that OAN wanted to charge AT&T a lot of money in exchange for carrying its programming, and AT&T said it wouldn’t pay the price. OAN sued.

Then, AT&T had a change of heart: Not only would it put OAN on its menu of DirecTV channels, it would also provide what amounts to a subsidy for the network to the tune of tens of millions of dollars — $57 million in monthly fees over five years, Reuters reported. As it turns out, no one wants to advertise on OAN except for maybe the MyPillow guy and a few others, and OAN obtained 90 percent of its revenue from the AT&T deal.

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