For those not already familiar with the network, One America News Network was launched six years ago for viewers who feel that Fox doesn't lean far enough to the right to suit them. As Business Insider's Ellen Cranley discussed in an article earlier this year, the network has been called "paid Russian propaganda," and has grown in popularity after gaining favor with Trump:
Fox News, a longstanding favorite news outlet of conservatives, spent the first two years of President Donald Trump's administration largely avoiding his fiery insults of the news industry.
Recently, however, the network has faced his wrath as it has appeared openly conflicted over the president's impeachment troubles and slowed its on-air tokens of goodwill. As Trump has grown more open with his disappointment in Fox, one network appears poised to take the spot of Trump's favorite.
One America News is a lesser-known outlet that has seemingly won Trump's stamp of approval after dedicating huge amounts of coverage to the administration, including airing Trump's rallies in full and having opinion anchors casting impeachment proceedings by House Democrats as a lie-ridden "frenzy."
Ratings show the network's rising popularity. As of March 2019, data measured by media analytics company Comscore shows that among Cable, News/ Business/ Info networks, OAN ranked as the fourth-highest service in that genre, behind Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and CNN, beating out big names like CNN Headline News, Fox Business Channel, CNBC, BBC World News, Fusion, Bloomberg.
Fox's Howard Kurtz did his best to regain some favor from Trump on this Sunday's Media Buzz when he and his guests, The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway and the Washington Examiner's Susan Ferrichio attempted to normalize Rudy Giuliani's "unhinged" impeachment special that aired on OAN earlier this week (which also reaired on Russian state TV) despite warnings from their token Democratic guest Jessica Tarlov on what a dangerous road this was to go down.
KURTZ: Let me ask you Susan, some in the media, and not just liberals, have said that why did Giuliani take an OAN camera crew to Ukraine, because regardless of whether you liked the report or didn't like the report, that he was generating more press as president Trump was in the process of being impeached.
FERRICHIO: I don't know. I don't know why he's being abused in The New Yorker. It's baffling. What's really important for the media though, is to, this is really crazy how he just, it's all about what Rudy Giuliani is doing and not about what he's talking about, which I think, deserves more scrutiny.
As you just said, he's being transparent. About what? That he thinks there was something there with Yovanovitch getting in the way of examining potential corruption involving 2016 and the Trump campaign and the DNC. He wants to find out more about that and Yovanovitch he thought was getting in the way. That gets no attention from the media. It's dismissed outright as a fabrication, when there's been reporting showing that there may be truth to that. And that is a part of this, the neglected part of this, and it's very disturbing to me.
TARLOV: This is a dangerous road to go down. This is why Senator Kennedy had to apologize after he was on Fox News Sunday.
FERRICHIO: Then he came back on --
TARLOV: That's actually not true. And Marco Rubio and everyone who was on Senate Intel (crosstalk) Really? To tell more lies about what happened in 2016!?
KURTZ: Wait a second because we're short on time. Giuliani blames the media for... he sees their out to get him, and he blames the media for not sufficiently covering the Hunter Biden scandal, so he says he has to push it out there.
Herein lies the problem with getting Fox off of the air. Even if we're successful, there's always something worse waiting in the wings to take its place. In the meantime, outlets like OAN are pushing the liars and propagandists on Fox even further into alternate reality land.
