One America News owner and founder Robert Herring, Sr. aired his hot channel this week urging viewers to call other cable providers and beg them to do OAN after the decision of satellite company DirecTV to remove the right network.
“I’m sure a lot of you have heard the news by now that AT&T and DirecTV have decided to scrap our service,” said Herring on the spot, which has run on OAN shows and has flagged first by Media Matters. “It was a big surprise for me when I read it in the news last Friday night, because I’m sure it’s with you.”
Herring then launched its long-standing relationship with AT&T, the majority owner of DirecTV. Reuters reported last October that AT&T not only played a key role in founding One America News in 2013, but also kept the fact-free channel alive through OAN’s contract with DirecTV.
“I have been with AT&T in one capacity or another since I was 20 years old,” he said. “I started as a chauffeur driving their executives around town; and later growing up, this little news network that I built with my family and a small group of the hardest working individuals I know found its way into the AT&T channel lineup. ”
The 80-year-old businessman continues to blame DirecTV’s decision to scrap OAN this spring on AT&T’s recent leadership change. (AT&T was faced with Public pressure from activists for months leave the channel over its broadcasting trend violent rhetoric and the plots of the right wing have not been realized.)
“We worked with a man named John Stankey at AT&T before, and we always appreciated the wonderful working relationship we had with him,” he lamented. “But just recently, AT&T’s new head of board, William Kennard, told us that he and the rest of the board simply don’t want to shoulder our burdens. again.”
In an online monologue earlier this week, OAN host Dan Ball urged viewers to call AT&T and “raise hell” and ask them to keep his life. Furthermore, Ball also asked his audience to learn the “dirt” about Kennard so he could air it on his show.
“You bring me concrete proof of anything that could have happened: his tax fraud, cheating on his wife, saying racial slurs against white people,” the OAN star said bluntly in his passage, explicitly noting that Kennard is black. “Anything is possible. Find it for me!”
While Herring did not urge OAN fans to flood AT&T’s phone lines or provide him with rumors about the company’s president, he did urge them to try to convince other carriers to develop his channel.
“Now we don’t know exactly what we are going to do. But don’t worry, we have a lot to choose from,” he declared. “We were and still are happy to talk to cable providers across the country.”
Herring added: “We’d also like to suggest that you, our viewers, get in touch with the cable provider in your area — whether it’s Spectrum, Dish or any of the great ones. any other — and let them know that you want them to make One America News. We only charge 10 cents per household per month. That’s great by any standard, with all the great content our team puts out. ”
The loss of DirecTV represents an existential crisis for One America News, as it provides the bulk of the channel’s revenue and viewership. The the network seems to be left with only two national service providers: Verizon FiOS, offers OAN only to a few million homes in the US and experienced a drop in subscribersand CenturyLink Prism, a struggling service seems to be in its last days.
