It’s incredible. A San Diego-based right-wing cable channel still questions whether Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. As recently as March 28, one of the correspondents at One America News Network said, “There’s still serious doubts about who’s actually president.” This statement was made by “correspondent” Pearson Sharp.
To go by much of OAN’s reporting, it is almost as if a transfer of power had never taken place.
OANN is currently located at 4757 Morena Blvd, San Diego, CA 92117 and its public phone number is (858) 270-6900.
Reportedly, OANN is available in some 35 million households. And it has become “a kind of Trump TV for the post-Trump age, an outlet whose reporting has aligned with the former president’s grievances at a time when he is barred from major social media platforms.”
Earlier in March, we reported:
In January 2020, just as the election campaign had geared up, OAN ran a one-hour of program titled “The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder with guest host Michael Caputo.”
Newly declassified intelligence was released to the public on how Russian President Putin tried to influence the 2020 election in favor of Trump, and as part of the Kremlin campaign of disinformation that was pro-Trump and anti-Biden, was the use of un-named American “media conduits to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences,” states the report by the National Intelligence Council. And specifically, as part of the campaign efforts, “they also made contact with established U.S. media figures and helped produce a documentary that aired on a U.S. television network in late January 2020.”
Well, OANN was one of those “media conduits.”
The basic conclusion was then that, ” a San Diego-based, right-wing cable channel has been a vehicle for the pro-Trump disinformation campaign ordered by Putin to influence our election in 2020.”
According to the New York Times:
OAN has also promoted the debunked theory that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were left-wing agitators. Toward the end of a March 4 news segment that described the attack as the work of “antifa” and “anti-Trump extremists” — and referred to the president as “Beijing Biden” — Mr. Sharp said, “History will show it was the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who called for this violence.” Investigations have found no evidence that people who identify with antifa, a loose collective of antifascist activists, were involved in the Capitol riot.
Charles Herring, the president of Herring Networks, the company that owns OAN, defended the reports casting doubt on the election. “Based on our investigations, voter irregularities clearly took place in the November 2020 election,” he said. “The real question is to what extent.”
Herring Networks was founded by Mr. Herring’s father, the tech entrepreneur Robert Herring, who at age 79 runs OAN with Charles and another son, Robert Jr. About 150 employees work for the channel at its headquarters in San Diego.
The news site AlterNet reports, “Some of OAN’s coverage has not had the full support of the staff. In interviews with 18 current and former OAN newsroom employees, 16 said the channel had broadcast reports that they considered misleading, inaccurate or untrue.” At least a dozen employees have left OANN since the Capitol riot. Those who speak up, get in trouble. One employee recalled seeing a photo of someone in the Capitol mob holding a flag emblazoned with the OAN logo.
Also from AlterNet:
While OAN has so far avoided a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems over defamatory comments about election fraud, some employees wish one was forthcoming to change the culture at the network.
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