On Monday, Senator Rand Paul did something bold. “@DirecTV is cancelling @OANN so I just cancelled my home Direct TV,” he tweeted. “Why give money to people who hate us?” Paul’s outraged missive was in response to the news that DirecTV, a subsidiary of media conglomerate AT&T, would drop far-right and ardently-Trump-supporting One America News Network (OANN) from its lineup—news that caused right-wing politicians and media figures to dissolve into paroxysms of outrage.
DirecTV attests that it made the decision “following a routine internal review.” But OANN’s defenders see its axing as an overt hit job. Representative Jim Jordan described it as the latest phase in “The Left’s purge,” while Representative Lauren Boebert suggested the Joe Biden may have had a hand in DirecTV’s decision. “Pretty convenient that this comes within a week after Biden begged companies to silence ‘misinformation,’ meaning his opposition,” tweeted the Colorado Republican.
On Wednesday, Senator Steve Daines sent a letter to DirecTV CEO Bill Morrow urging the provider to change course. “There has not been sufficient justification from DirecTV as to why OAN’s contract was not renewed by your company,” Daines wrote in the letter, which was obtained by the Daily Caller. “A vague ‘routine internal review’ and the lack of transparency…in your decision making process is unacceptable and has the appearance of targeting supporters of former President Donald Trump.”
Unsurprisingly, the sharpest critique has come from the network itself. On his Monday-night broadcast, host Dan Ball declared that “One America News Network is now at war with AT&T, and it is time that we all fight and fight like hell with our words and our pocketbooks.” He claimed that AT&T chairman William Kennard has had “connections to the Obamas and the Clintons for decades,” and encouraged viewers to pile on. “If you’ve got any dirt on Mr. Kennard, I’d love to see it and put it on this program,” he said. “You bring me concrete evidence of whatever it may be: cheating on his taxes, cheating on his wife, saying racial slurs towards white people.” (The latter was presumably a reference to Kennard being Black.) He continued: “Whatever it may be. Find it for me. Bring it, and we’ll air it.” Ball also urged viewers to call DirecTV’s customer support line on an hourly basis to “complain,” “raise hell,” and “demand they keep OAN.”
Donald Trump himself took on the controversy over the weekend, singing the network’s praises at his rally in Arizona. “I love One America News,” he told the crowd. “I watch it all the time and you really get the truth. And they want to cancel them now because of politics—for purely political reasons. It’s a disgrace what’s going on.” He went on to suggest a boycott: “I don’t think that people are gonna stand for it. Maybe what we should do is not use AT&T.”
It was OANN’s obsession with Trump that helped make its name—the network was relatively unknown before its hosts began pushing Trump’s election conspiracy theories—but the same fixation has caused the network no shortage of problems. OANN is also still fighting two defamation lawsuits from voting-equipment companies that its hosts accused of tampering in the 2020 election. When its contract with DirecTV ends in April, it will likely lose a huge chunk of its viewership—unless the likes of Rand Paul and Steve Daines can turn things around.
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