Left Declares Victory Pushing OAN Off DirecTV
By Eric Mack
By Eric Mack | Sunday, 16 January 2022 02:20 PM
DirecTV’s announcement it will not renew One America News’ (OAN) contract in April has become a political hot-button – with leftists celebrating the move and former President Donald Trump teasing a boycott of AT&T at Saturday night’s campaign rally.
“The free market in action,” Rep. Ted Liu, D-Calif., tweeted Friday. “DirecTV drops fringe network OAN.”
Former TV pundit Lou Dobbs tweeted a reminder earlier this week that President Joe Biden issued a call for media companies to work to silence “dissent.”
House Democrats Try Pressuring TV Carriers to Stop Hosting Fox, OAN, and Newsmax
“Corporate Media is crushing what little dissent remains: DirecTV Cancels OAN after Joe Biden Orders Media Outlets and Tech Giants to Banish Voices that Deviate from the Regime’s Official Narrative,” Dobbs tweeted.
Activist group Occupy Democrats hailed the move as a victory, while Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, denounced the “purge,” asking “who’s next” in a tweet:
“The Left’s purge continues:
– YouTube demonetizes Dan Bongino.
– DirectTV drops One America News.
– Twitter suspends Dr. Malone.
Who’s next?”
Trump blasted the telecommunications and media giant at his rally speech Saturday night in Florence, Arizona.
“The woke executives, I don’t know what the hell they’re doing, they have so much debt,” he told a large crowd, teasing a “boycott” of AT&T.
“I’m not going to use the word boycott! I will not say boycott AT&T.”
The OAN news drew strong praise from liberal CNN, which is also owned by AT&T.
CNN’s far-left media critics Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, who were the first to call for Trump to be “deplatformed” from Twitter, have been pushing a complete ban on conservative networks from major cable systems.
“If you don’t think Stelter, Darcy, CNN, The New York Times, Harvard, and the rest of the academic and media elites won’t go all-out to ban Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax next, you’re dead wrong,” NewsBusters’ Curtis Houck tweeted.
Stelter and Darcy pounced on the news of OAN’s cancellation, calling it “a significant blow to OAN,” which it rebuked as a “fringe network.”
CNN’s own ratings have taken a dive since Biden took office and in the wake of its own networks’ media malpractice and scandals.
For years, CNN embraced and promulgated claims of a Trump-Russian collusion theory, reports that turned out to be with no substantiation.
And, last year, the network fired its lead prime time host Chris Cuomo, after it was disclosed he worked closely advising his brother Andrew Cuomo as he fought several harassment claims by women.
“DirecTV’s move will deal a significant blow to OAN,” Darcy tweeted. “Not only will the fringe network be removed from the millions of households that use DirecTV as a television provider, it will also suffer a major hit to its revenue.”
CNN’s activism to censor conservative voices has spawned other left-wing groups to join the fray.
Last November, left-wing media activist group Media Matters was one of 16 organizations that wrote a letter to AT&T CEO John Stankey and DirecTV CEO Bill Morrow.
“We, the undersigned 16 civil-rights, human-rights and media-justice organizations, call on you to end your business relationships with One America News Network (OANN),” a letter read from 16 leftist groups, including Color of Change, Greenpeace USA, Common Cause, and Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
That letter was just the catalyst in a series of events guided by activism against OAN, targeting its revenue stream from DirecTV and AT&T.
Amid CNN’s calls for targeting opposing conservative networks, Reuters published an investigative report claiming AT&T and its subsidiary DirecTV were pivotal to OAN’s economic viability.
Just days later, liberal comedian John Oliver called out AT&T, followed by a meeting the company had with the NAACP demanding that they “drop OAN immediately,” according to The Hill.
Lets see how this works Democrats in congress pressure networks to drop newsmax, oann and foxnews. Biden goes to Ga. and tell the news companies to not air the stories against him. Then AT&T the parent company of Directv all of a sudden cancels One America News Network. A very vocal opponent of Biden and his administration. Ah, but AT&T also is the parent of CNN. Who’s own ratings are in the toilet. What happen to Freedom of the Press? I guess if it’s not what you want to hear or read you can effectively shut them down.