July 27, 2022

Verizon Says Good Riddance to One America News

Good night, sweet prince.Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts/Zuma

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Verizon just dealt One America News, former President Trump’s favorite far-right “news” network, a death blow.

Starting Saturday, Verizon Fios will stop carrying OAN, depriving the cable network’s 3.5 million subscribers of their daily dose of conspiracy-mongering bullshit. The move follows DirecTV’s decision to drop OAN earlier this year, robbing the network of its biggest revenue stream.

As my colleague Ross Choma wrote at the time:

From the beginning, the network has positioned itself far to the right of even Fox News, regularly featuring pundits who aren’t welcome on other channels and aggressively promoting stories involving conspiracy theories, including the Seth Rich conspiracy, COVID denialism, and anti-vaccine disinformation. OAN cemented its position as former president Donald Trump’s favorite network after the 2020 election by continuing to question the election results well after Fox and other major news networks declared Joe Biden the winner.

Soon, OAN will be available only to a few hundred thousand subscribers to smaller cable providers and streaming providers—which still strikes me as a hell of a lot of people to be consuming this stuff.

Verizon told the Daily Beast that it was dropping OAN because the network refused to agree to a new contract. But Dan Ball, host of the OAN program “Real America,” said on-air that Verizon had told his bosses, “We don’t think you’re a credible news organization, so we’re dropping you.” Only in the Bizarro World of OAN would the network’s patent lack of credibility be easier to admit than its refusal to agree to a contract. And only in the Bizarro World of OAN would Ball imply that he and his colleagues are pillars of journalistic integrity. “For any of you liberal activists online over at the Beast or Media Matters or all those stupid-ass liberal rags online that’s gonna take this segment, try to twist it, and say I’m out there, pleading for this, begging for that, blah blah blah,” he said, “do me a favor, will you folks please act like journalists for one damn minute?”

I’m sorry, what?

OAN’s Alison Steinberg had another final message: “If you’re watching this, and you’re laughing and scoffing because you think that you’re immune to what’s coming, you just wait. Enjoy your freedoms while you’ve still got ’em.”

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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