Behind the scenes at OAN: The TV network where Trump is always right

The first week of October ended in chaos, as reporters pieced together the spread of the coronavirus among White House officials and the condition of a hospitalised Donald Trump, who was removed from Walter Reed medical centre to wave at supporters from a secret service escort while on an experimental drug regimen.

But on the One America News Network, the president’s illness was just another day in his term. The US is rooting for him to get back into the White House and the president’s rival Joe Biden wears a mask as a “political prop”.

Embraced by the president and aired inside the west wing, the young right-wing news channel launched in 2013 as a counter to “mainstream media” networks, but it found its audience two years later while airing then-candidate Trump’s campaign rallies.

It’s a news network tailored to this presidency – a platform to defend the president against his critics, air grievances against his opponents, and launch a whirlwind of misleading claims that feed a far-right 24-hour news cycle.

By Monday morning, the president’s illness and the spread of the disease through the White House was largely absent from OAN’s wall-to-wall coverage. Instead, it was replaced with assurance from administration officials that the president was on the mend, as well as criticism levelled at other media outlets for echoing concerns from medical experts about the president’s disregard for health guidelines.

The network did not reference the president’s dismissive and misleading remarks about the disease, concerns from health officials about his medical regimen nor uncertainty about the scale of infections at the White House. By Tuesday, more than a dozen people with close ties to the administration had tested positive for Covid-19, eight months from the onset of the pandemic that has killed more than 210,000 Americans.

Following the president’s drive outside the hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, the hosts behind the desk at OAN said “many” people said “he looked healthy” and “many praise” his storm of Twitter posts, while “some” said “he’s back” while spending a “working weekend” at Walter Reed, where he was “just undergoing some monitoring.”

At least three times throughout afternoon programming, the network played a clip featuring an unnamed black Trump supporter who had joined the crowd.

“He’s been fighting for us, I’m gonna fight for him,” he said.

While the president has been accused of manipulating government-funded media organisations to more closely resemble what comes from the White House, and attempted to undermine reporters covering his administration as “fake news” while he creates his own, OAN is a privately run media company that gladly amplifies his agenda while courting his favour.

The president has promoted the network on his social media feeds and at the White House, where the network has joined the press pool by the invitation of press secretaries Stephanie Grisham and Kayleigh McEnany. One former correspondent has also joined the administration.

In September, the network expanded its prime-time line-up ahead of its second presidential election coverage.

OAN is in 35 million homes in more than 200 markets, though it’s unclear how many people are actually tuning in. The network has claimed that it is the fourth-ranked cable news network, based on Comscore set-box data, rather than Nielsen ratings.

But it has the attention of its most important viewer.

In May, Mr Trump encouraged cable companies to carry the network: ”I hate to be promoting AT&T, but @OANN is Great News, not Fake News. Everybody should be carrying them!”

OAN is available through cable providers AT&T, DirecTV and Verizon, but it’s not among the offerings from other major providers including Comcast and Spectrum. It’s also available online through the streaming platform Klowd TV as part of a package with InfoWars.

Crucially, OAN has a social media presence – the network’s audience of 1 million Twitter followers and more than 800,000 Facebook followers is much smaller than its competitors, but the president has tagged its accounts dozens of times over the last five years.

The network has bridged the president’s demands for loyalty with a “tremendously captive audience with a high degree of allegiance to far-right news,” according to Samuel Woolley, project director for propaganda research at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth.

“It acts as a kind of go-to echo chamber that people that already ascribe to, so the viewers can visit to reaffirm what they want to believe,” he told The Independent. “On a smaller scale – like Fox News but in a much more aggressively far-right way – it’s able to present its own version of the truth as it related to the present’s intentions and the intentions of the more extreme elements of the Republican Party.”

A blindly partisan allegiance to the media “is particularly worrisome because it corresponds with a growth of polarisation,” he said. “Having limited access to information of any kind has a causal effect on people’s emotions and relationships.”

But OAN is only a microcosm of far-right media that has emerged from the 2016 election and shaped political and conspiratorial coverage over the last four years, pushing stories that “end up looking like conspiracy or disinformation or out and out propaganda from the White House,” according to Mr Woolley.

Coupled with its social media presence, OAN “exists as part of a larger network within the propaganda ecosystem,” one that’s legitimised by a real-life cable news channel, he said.

“A lot of people go to traditional news networks to verify the kinds of conspiracy that they’re seeing,” he said. “What they’re seeing is always in support of the far-right conspiracies they’re seeing online – it’s very much in dialogue with the creators that are creating mis- and disinformation online [that’s] almost inextricable from a broader propaganda ecosystem.”

By airing on cable, “it means in the eyes of the consumer, it’s granted a degree of legitimacy than some random thread on Facebook.”

Robert Herring Sr, after selling his family’s business in 2000 for $122m, launched Wealth TV, now known as A Wealth of Entertainment, a luxury travel and lifestyle network.

At the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference, Charles Herring – Mr Herring’s son – announced the beginnings of the One America News Network, promising a “reliable, credible, fact-based” platform “where more voices can be heard – voices that are ignored, libertarian and conservative voices.”

Ostensibly engineered to avoid the roundtable effect on cable competitors, where a single story draws focus across several hours of programming, OAN would mimic the “fast-paced” online news cycle with a multitude of stories aired throughout the day.

From its headquarters in San Diego, it advertised a new national news brand, launching from the ground up and broadcasting up to 21 hours daily, with young journalists and producers in the San Diego area applying for an opportunity for steady work in a grim, post-recession media landscape.

One former employee, hired two months before the network launched, told The Independent he was shocked by a lack of understanding among management about operating a newsroom.

“Right off the bat, I got the feeling that the owner had no interest in journalism, had no experience in journalism, and had no interest in launching an outlet that would respect the rules of journalism,” said the employee, who now works in the Los Angeles television market and has agreed to speak about his experience at the network on the condition of anonymity.

When it launched on 4 July 2013, OAN broadcast a steady stream of breaking news with conservative-leaning commentary. But as Mr Trump elbowed into the Republican primaries, Mr Herring became more involved with the network’s direction.

In 2015, the network began carrying then-candidate Trump’s rallies, broadcast by wire services and aired in their entirety – OAN saw an immediate spike in ratings from viewers pulled into the live coverage of what would become a staple throughout the campaign and administration.

According to former employees, Mr Herring – known among staff as Mr H – sent the newsroom story ideas from Breitbart and Drudge, as the network found an audience among then-candidate Trump’s supporters, while network officials began courting the campaign directly.

“In short order, it became the rule – we run all favourable Trump stories, and we carry all Trump rallies live in their entirety,” one former employee said.

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin interviewed Mr Trump on OAN in August 2015.

Ahead of Mitt Romney’s damning March 2016 speech urging voters to reject then-candidate Trump in the remaining primary elections, Mr Herring allegedly told producers: “Do not carry the Romney speech live.”

Among other directives: avoid stories about Russian interference, police brutality and killings of black men, and Elon Musk and Tesla – Mr Herring drives one. (During a recent segment on Real America with Dan Ball, the host said that it “doesn’t sound like blacks are being slaughtered in the streets.”)

In an email obtained by The Washington Post, producer Kyle Warnke said he was leaving the network because he was “disappointed in our bloated coverage of Donald Trump.”

“It’s obvious why we cling to him: He brings in eyeballs and he’s clearly friendly to our station,” he said. “But we’re not treating him like we treat the other candidates in the 2016 race, even his Republican rivals.”

The network did not respond to The Independent’s request for comment.

While the president grew impatient with Fox News, he found a home at the much-smaller OAN.

Between segments, OAN’s commercial breaks on a recent broadcast included trailers for right-wing filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s latest film TRUMP CARD, infomercials for medical products and firearms, and Trump campaign ads.

A breaking news alert, interrupting an interview with senator Marsha Blackburn, announced a congressional candidate forum between Republican challenger Eric Early and Democratic incumbent Adam Schiff, who won against his Republican challenger in California by nearly 80 per cent of the vote in 2018. OAN aired nearly the entire forum.

Sebastian Gorka appeared in another segment raging against presidential debate moderator and Fox News host Chris Wallace for criticising the president’s refusal to follow debate structure.

“Are you suddenly a member of the Third Reich?” Mr Gorka said. “Utterly fascistic.”

On Real America with Dan Ball, the network’s latest programme, the host shared clips from Late Night with Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live, highlighting jokes about the president’s coronavirus infection and his months spent denying its risks.

“A bad sign for America,” Mr Ball said. “We should always respect the office.”

Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and “pizzagate” conspiracy theorist and alt-right figure Jack Posobiec are among the network’s alumni, but its most visible personality is Chanel Rion, the network’s chief White House correspondent, a staple at briefings where she offers leading, conspiracy-laden questions that often tee up canned responses from the president and his press secretary.

On her website, she is described as a “fierce foe of anything Clinton, of everything Obama, and as a total and unrelenting enemy of academic left-liberalism and political correctness anywhere.”

“She has been aboard the Trump train from its first week and spent 20-hour days during the entire 2016 New Hampshire primary on the ground for the Trump campaign, working the New Hampshire winter, doing her part,” according to her website.

On 1 April, she was barred from the briefing room by the White House Correspondents’ Association for violating its Covid-19 guidelines. She came back as a guest of the administration.

In an April letter to Ms McEnany and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a legal counsel for OAN argued the network’s correspondents are treated "as if they were suspect and unwanted interlopers" and demanded officials "assert control over access to White House grounds."

"Viewpoint neutrality under the First Amendment is too important in press coverage of the White House to be left to the private biases of the [correspondents’ association," the letter said.

In August, Ms Rion launched the National White House Correspondents Association, a rebuke of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which the network claimed “largely amounts to a confederation of journalists with long socialist agendas and deep links to the Democrat Party.”

That month, Mr Herring suggested that the president submit to an interview.

“Isn’t it amazing that President Trump has not given any @OANN journalist a sit-down interview,” he said on Twitter. “They all practice good hygiene … Their questions have been posed to keep America informed and not to attack the President. Can’t figure it out!”

On 26 August, hours before the Republican National Convention, the network aired a formal one-on-one interview between the president and Ms Rion, who asked the president a series of leading questions:

“We’re watching Joe Biden slip very gently into senility while you’re at the top of your game. What’s your secret?”

“Tens of millions of Americans, everyday Americans, people who you may not have lived lives like, really support you and your family and your campaign to the great frustration of your adversaries. Why do you think you’re able to have this kind of empathy for people you don’t have to have shared experiences?”

“When you’re hosting that briefing room, sitting across from you, there are people there who if in any circumstance, you would probably get along with them fine, if you weren’t president and if they weren’t journalists. So, something happens though, somewhere along the way the cameras turn on and all of a sudden the vitriol starts – their questions often devoid of rationality, reason, decency. So my question to you is, do you think these attacks against you in that briefing room, are they organic questions from individual free-thinking people or do you think these journalists are afraid they might lose their jobs if they don’t attack you every day?”

That month, former OAN host Emily Miller was hired as the federal Food and Drug Administration’s assistant commissioner for media affairs. A week after commissioner Stephen Hahn announced her arrival, he announced her departure – but she remains an agency “appointee” installed by the White House.

While the network has struggled to break through to mainstream audiences, its coverage has magnified the kinds of conspiracies that US intelligence analysts have warned are primed for exploitation by Russian efforts to sow discord and distrust in the US.

The network airs half-hour and hourlong news blocks as well as special programming, including a three-hour programme in which Ms Rion and the president’s attorney Rudy Giuliani travelled to Ukraine to reveal how Democrats “collaborated foreign interference into the 2016 presidential election,” elevating conspiracies promoted by Mr Giuliani and his allies about the Biden family and Ukraine that prompted the president’s impeachment in the first place.

OAN’s programme was also aired by Russia-1, a state-owned network.

In June, the president shared a baseless conspiracy to his more than 80 million Twitter followers claiming that a 75-year-old man in Buffalo, captured on video being knocked to the ground by police officers and hospitalised with a brain injury after bleeding from his fractured skull, was “an Antifa provocateur” and part of a “setup.”

Martin Gugino – a longtime human rights activist and member of the Catholic Worker Movement – is recovering from the incident.

The president tagged OAN, which promoted the conspiracy in a segment narrated by Kristian Brunovich Rouz, who has worked for the network since 2017 while also writing for Sputnik, the Kremlin-run news agency.

Another segment identified Mr Gugino as “far from the kindly old man that many in the media are describing”.

In May, the network filed a $10m defamation lawsuit against MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who ran a segment on her programme discussing The Daily Beast’s reporting of Mr Rouz.

In her segment, Ms Maddow said that “the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda.”

OAN took issue with the word “literally” – in its suit, the network clarified that Mr Rouz “worked as a freelancer for Sputnik” which “had no relation to his work for OAN.”

US District Court judge Cynthia Bashant tossed out the suit.

In court filings, OAN agreed that the president “has praised OAN, and Rouz, a staffer for OAN, writes articles for Sputnik News which is affiliated with the Russian government,” according to the ruling.

In its appeal, OAN argued that “none of OAN's content is paid for or influenced by the Russian government.”

“We are fully prepared to take this case to the United States Supreme Court if necessary,” Robert Herring said in a statement. “Maddow has claimed that our family has engaged in treasonous acts. Nothing is further from the truth and her propagated falsehood has hurt our integrity and viewership trust.”

In a now-retracted OAN segment from 7 May, Mr Rouz amplified a conspiracy theory claiming that the patent for the Covid-19 drug treatment remdesivir – which has been used by the president – is controlled by the Chinese government, Bill Gates, the World Health Organisation and the Clintons, “allegedly backed by globalist billionaire George Soros.”

On Monday’s prime-time programme In Focus with Stephanie Hammill (“Hamill, a straight shooter, isn’t afraid to tell you what she thinks”), the host said that the president’s recent departure from Walter Reed while hospitalised “is making members of the radical left and their media sycophants apoplectic.”

“I think it’s great he’s being so transparent with his health,” she said.

That night, OAN host Kieran McKinney said of the coronavirus: “Pretty much everyone in the world will get it, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

As the president returned to the White House on Monday, he told Americans: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life.”

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hicks Equity Partners, owned by the family of Thomas Hicks Jr, a Trump ally and Republican National Committee co-chair, was exploring a buyout.

In May, Vanity Fair reported that a group of investors, along with Donald Trump Jr, considered a move to acquire a major stake in the network to launch a “Trump TV” to directly take on Fox News. The Herrings have denied that a deal was in progress and have not publicly declared an intention to sell the network.

As election day nears, current and former employees at the network have considered how OAN will adapt to a potential post-Trump presidency, and whether its coverage will shift to support an ideological Trumpism if he’s no longer in office, or be in service of a power that’s committed to the same goals.

Current and former employees also have feared that OAN could inflame the president’s attempts to undermine the results of the election and “drag out” the contest, elevating the president’s attacks against mail-in voting and refusal to accept the results or a commitment to a peaceful transfer of power.

“They found their base, their Trump base, which has always been there,” according to one former employee. “They’ll still tune into One America.”