![]() ![]() ![]() “One of the points we make in the paper is that there is a tradeoff in moving farther towards the ideological extreme: if people watch, you'll have greater influence on their beliefs, but you also increase the risk that they are turned off by it and don't watch at all,” Martin said. Martin’s research has found that in terms of gaining cable TV market share, there are diminishing returns when it comes toward pushing extremism at your target audience, suggesting that OAN’s quest to out-conspiracy Fox might not be a winning formula. But he added that Fox maintains its massive audience by including just enough hard news (like a legitimate election data team willing to call Arizona early for Biden) to keep at least the illusion of integrity intact. “Fox News in some sense created the market for OAN, by building up the taste for conservative-slanted TV news in a large audience,” Martin said. A recent Morning Consult poll found that Fox News’ favorability among Republicans dropped from 67 to 54 percent post-election-simply for occasionally telling viewers the truth.īut without free daily advertising from the president, overtaking Fox will be a steep uphill climb for the fledgling network-especially if OAN continues to double down on conspiracies and nonsense, Stanford professor of political economics Greg Martin told Motherboard. The MAGA set has become furious at Fox’s failure to more fully embrace false claims of election fraud, and for (accurately) calling Arizona for Joe Biden before other outlets on election night. While OAN may not be brainwashing a massive audience it is providing plausible-seeming props and set dressing for Trump as he uses social media to create an alternate reality in which he won the election, defeated the coronavirus, and is unfairly besieged on all sides by mean journalists and the “deep state.” It’s a false reality OAN hopes to take to the mainstream. Neither OAN nor AT&T responded to inquiries about the status of the contract. Reports earlier this year indicated that OAN’s contract with AT&T is up for renewal next year, potentially removing AT&T’s 19 million potential viewers from the equation if a new deal can’t be reached. OAN’s biggest cable distributor, AT&T/DirecTV, has been trimming costs due to sustained TV subscriber losses from cord cutting and mismanagement. A June Bloomberg report attributed this reluctance to stringent OAN contract requirements, an asking price out of line with the channel’s quality, or a lack of interest in being associated with controversy. OAN’s ambitions have been challenged by the fact that numerous major cable outlets, including Comcast, Spectrum, and Dish Network have refused to carry the channel. But while experts say OAN’s impact is overstated and future success unsure, they also warn that without a major course correction, the channel’s modest success is a troubling harbinger of dumber and more dangerous things to come. This relationship, like so much about Trump's presidency, is seemingly unique and aberrant. ![]() It is a symbiotic relationship, in which Trump can point to what vaguely look like news reports to buttress his own conspiracy theorizing, and the network, by providing them, can access his massive and loyal audience. In seven years OAN has gone from completely unknown to being routinely amplified by Trump, catering in many ways to an audience of one. Tuesday, YouTube suspended the OAN channel for a week after the company uploaded a video promoting a bogus cure for COVID-19. ![]() “Newly released video appeared to show Gugino using a police tracker on his phone trying to scan police communications during the protest,” the network falsely claimed. Video clearly showed the elderly Gugino doing nothing wrong, but OAN insisted he was an “Antifa provocateur” using sophisticated tech to target the police. Last June, 75-year-old Martin Gugino had his skull fractured after being shoved to the ground by Buffalo police officers. “However, it appears this coup attempt is led by a well-funded network of anarchists trying to take down the president.” “According to the mainstream media, the riots and extreme violence are completely unorganized,” the network proclaimed last August. ![]()
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