Trump’s recent promotion of OANN hasn’t come at Fox News’s expense. Those were the first mentions since before the inauguration. Starting from a bit earlier, in mid-March, Trump mentioned OANN seven times in tweets. Since that unusual rift developed, Trump has explicitly promoted OANN’s content five times on Twitter. calls bullshit.” Screengrab via Eric Hananoki on TwitterĪ couple of weeks later, Fox News rankled Trump by hosting a Bernie Sanders town hall event. The network responded with a salty, since-deleted tweet in which it lamented that Trump omitted “a single mention of One America News - one of his GREATEST supporters. At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in March, Trump gave a speech in which he thanked a number of his supporters in the media, but didn’t mention OANN. In return, OANN apparently expects Trump to help promote the network, as he routinely does for Fox News. Its anchors frame news stories with introductions like, “the president keeps another promise, slashing regulations to a historic low,” the network employed former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a contributor for a time, and in March went as far as to cite the fringe conspiracy website Gateway Pundit as a source for a story aimed at establishing that the Obama-era Department of Justice “ took steps to infiltrate Trump’s campaign with spies in December 2015.” OANN has been just as loyal to Trump since he took office. Indeed, during the campaign, OANN pushed conspiracy theories about the email hacks of Democratic politicians and operatives that suggested they were an inside job downplayed a hot mic recording of Trump bragging about groping women and ran a special about Hillary Clinton titled, “Betrayal at Benghazi: The Cost of Hillary Clinton’s Dereliction and Greed.” We also see some of our highest ratings during the Trump speeches.” Not to mention we have loyal viewers that tune in specifically to see the Trump speeches live because no one else carries them. Trump January 13, 2016Įmails obtained by the Post indicate that shortly after Trump announced his candidacy, OANN executive producer Lindsay Oakley directed staff to “ALWAYS take the trump speeches live in their entirety,” adding that “Trump is being treated unfairly by the mainstream media and we need to provide the other side. . . #VoteTrump #IowaCaucus /Ecs9XYXaXL- Donald J. THANK YOU, IOWA! Highly respected poll just released. In turn, Trump repeatedly promoted OANN’s Trump-favorable polling. According to the Washington Post, Charles’s father, Robert Herring - owner of Herring Broadcasting - went as far as to ban OANN employees from covering any polls that didn’t show Trump in the lead. Herring Broadcasting announced the launch of OANN at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), with president Charles Herring promising that it’d be a “reliable, credible, fact-based” outlet that would “provide a platform where more voices can be heard, voices that are ignored, libertarian and conservative voices.”īut during the 2016 presidential election cycle, the network went all in for Trump. Trump certainly enjoys lots of positive coverage on Fox News, but his recent promotion of OANN is a good reminder that, in an era of ever-segmenting audiences eager to find a point of view they agree with, there’s still a free market of competition for Trump’s media loyalty. OANN’s platform is nowhere near as large as Fox News - the network is available via DirecTV and Verizon’s Fios but not most cable packages, and its ratings are reportedly beneath the Tennis Channel - but it is even more doggedly loyal to the president. (It’s unclear what evidence, if any, Trump has that OANN has experienced a “big ratings jump.”) “Also, congratulations to on the great job you are doing and the big ratings jump (“thank you President Trump”)!” he wrote. President Donald Trump began his Monday morning by posting a tweet thanking his favorite TV show, Fox & Friends, for a “great show this morning.” Four minutes later, the president posted another tweet congratulating a lesser-known right-wing news network - One America News Network.
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