United States – Dirty blow for a pro-Trump channel on the rise – lematin.ch

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The subscription television service DirecTV has decided not to renew its contract with One America News Network (OAN), an ultra-conservative and conspiratorial American media.

OAN is trying to chip away at market share from the conservative media benchmark, Fox News.

AFP

A major television service has decided to drop OAN, a pro-Trump channel. “Following a routine internal assessment, we have informed Herring Networks (the owner of OAN, editor’s note) that we do not intend to sign a new contract when the current one expires,” said a carrier. say DirecTV Friday.

The deal is due to end next April, according to a source familiar with the matter. DirecTV, which is owned by US telecommunications giant AT&T, did not detail the reasons for its decision.

OAN is one of the new ultra-conservative players in television news, which are trying to nibble market share from the Fox News benchmark. Like Newsmax or Real America’s Voice, the channel refused to recognize the defeat of Donald Trump in the presidential election in November 2020, relaying the conspiracy theories of electoral fraud formulated by the former head of state.

fake news

In mid-November 2020, OAN presenter Christina Bobb assured, for example, that the Democrats had “prepared a coup against the President of the United States”. Donald Trump himself had invited his supporters to turn to OAN and Newsmax and more and more prominent Republican personalities are accepting invitations on these two antennas.

The channel saw its audiences climb in the wake of the election, but DirecTV’s decision is a blow, because it is its largest distributor, according to specialized American media. A year ago, when supporters of Donald Trump invaded Congress during the ceremony certifying the victory of Democrat Joe Biden, OAN and Newsmax denounced, without any supporting evidence, the supposed infiltration of small groups of ultra-left.

(AFP)