AT&T, and
you know them because they're
probably in your life somewhere,
had been the biggest supporters of
OAN, One America Network.
The most conservative thing that
you can find on the air anywhere,
anywhere.
AT&T has poured tens of millions of
dollars into the fringe channel,
with an OAN accountant testifying
in 2020 that 90%,
90% of the network's revenue came
from a contract with AT&T-owned
affiliates.
Now, of course, you would want to
be on an AT&T-owned affiliate if
you are a startup cable network.
They have a broad reach, and they
also own DirecTV, which is exactly
where you would want to position
yourself to an older conservative
audience because it's television.
And even though I don't consider
myself old or conservative,
whether you might think I'm old,
I do watch and have DirecTV, and
this gives me pause.
Reuters cited a 2019 deposition in
which the founder of OAN, and
that's Robert Herring Sr.,
a Trump supporter.
Someone who asked Trump out loud to
why he wasn't calling on OAN
reporters at White House press
conferences.
This is what he said when he asked.
This is what he said in this
deposition.
They told us they wanted
a conservative network.
When they said that,
I jumped to it and built one,
smart thing, right?
OAN founder and
Chief Executive Robert Herring Sr.
said of AT&T executives
during a 2019 deposition,
according to Reuters.
So here he's being faced with,
okay, we will give you 90% of your
funding.
We need something in
the conservative space.
You're the guy to do it.
Of course, he's going to
do it, right?
He did it, and he did it with
an exclamation point.
Since then, AT&T remains
a vital source of funding for OAN,
which has gone on to do damage to
journalism.
Damage arguably to the country by
propagating the lies and putting
them out there and being a bullhorn
for the lies of Donald Trump.
And 90% of OAN's revenue came from
a contract, this is from
the Reuters article, with
AT&T-owned television platforms.
Including satellite broadcaster
DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn
testimony by an OAN accountant.
Herring has testified he was
offered $250 million for
OAN in 2019.
Schiffman goes on,
without the DirecTV detail,
the accountant said under oath,
the network's value would be zero.
Remember, he was offered 250
million, without AT&T, zero.
Court filings cited in the report
are said to show that one five-year
deal with AT&T alone brought
One America News about 57 million,
thanks to monthly fees included in
the agreement.
Now, here is what is puzzling
to me.
The fact that they said they had so
much progressive programming on
the left or
programming on the left.
They needed, they were crying out
for something that was conservative
to fill that spot.
Cenk, that on its surface is
unbelievable, but it also
makes me wonder about the money,
the corporate money that's going
not into just these candidates.
We were talking to Andrew Yang
today, not just the candidates.
This is going into
the networks that are propping up
those candidates.
>> Yeah 100%, this story,
it reveals so much about how media
actually works.
And so let's take it one at a time.
Let's start with what Michael said.
Apparently, an AT&T executive
reached out to these guys and said,
there's already seven news networks
on the left, and we need one
other than Fox News on the right.
What seven is he talking about?
That's insane.
So look, I want to be really clear
here, guys.
Because right wing has done
propaganda in this country for
the last four, five decades saying
that the media is liberal.
Now, you need to understand that
there are two different sets of
issues here, social and economic.
On the social issues,
not hating gay people,
black people, etc.,
the media is generally liberal.
Okay, yes, they don't think black
people or gay people should have
less rights than other people.
By the way, if you say, no,
Republicans don't believe that,
yes, they do.
They don't think that gay people
should be allowed to get married,
should be able to adopt.
That is less rights than
straight people.
I think trans people shouldn't
be allowed to go
into certain bathrooms,
participate in certain sports.
And so that is less right.
So is the media generally liberal
in not being barbaric to fellow
Americans?
I would say generally yes.
But on economic issues,
they're deeply conservative.
[LAUGH] I mean, every time Bernie
Sanders went to a debate, they say,
how are you going to pay for that?
How are you going to pay for that?
Whenever it was about something
that would help you guys,
healthcare for your family,
higher wages for your family, etc.
When it comes to war,
the mainstream media seems to love
it and revel in it.
When it comes to lower taxes for
the rich and corporations,
you never get the question of how
are you going to pay for that.
So to say that there are seven
liberal networks is insane.
The only one that is half liberal,
and here I use liberal in both
the positive and
pejorative way, is MSNBC, but
having their hopes of Republicans.
And economically,
they're not very different either.
But from a corporate perspective,
no, even that is too much.
We need more and
more conservative news, why?
That goes to point number two.
Part of the deal was now you just
go say conservative stuff,
that's great.
I assume the same propaganda is
always lower taxes for
corporations, low regulations,
ante labor, lower wages.
They love that propaganda,
that helps them.
But on top of that,
they layered in here, you're not to
ever speak badly of AT&T.
These are supposed to be
journalists, that's hilarious.
Now you know this, every single
person on OAN is a joke.
They don't care
about the news at all.
And they literally have
a deal where they're not allowed to
tell you the truth about their main
benefactor, okay?
So that's AT&T in this case.
And second of all, they said,
you should do positive stories,
especially about our mergers.
When we tell you that corporations
care about making money [LAUGH]
everyone goes, of course, right?
Except people in corporate
media would go, I don't know.
Corporations trying to make money,
and then manipulating the media to
do that.
Well, golly gee, they would never,
except they just did.
And then one more here, and
then we'll go back and
forth a little bit, but
the $57 million, guys,
that's basically free money.
By the way, I did the math on it.
I'm in this industry.
That is a very conservative number.
At about $0.12 a subscriber and
given how many
subscribers DirecTV had,
that number is likely much larger.
And then the company, their own
accountant admits on the record,
would be worth nothing without
the AT&T deal.
And they could have possibly sold
it for $250 million.
That's a rich Republican basically
being handed a quarter of
a billion dollars.
And then by the way, on OAN,
they'll turn around and
go, you just have to work hard.
Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
No, you just ask a corporation,
hey, you want to give me a quarter
of a billion dollars so
I'll do propaganda for you?
And they go, absolutely, do it.
And that's what OAN is is
a corporate propaganda outlet.
And it's outrageous that AT&T
did this.
At the same time, Michael,
[LAUGH] it's also semi-obvious in
that we certainly
didn't know the details of this.
No one would have guessed that AT&T
was propping up the most vile so
called network in the country that
promotes conspiracy theories and
lies and
tries to undermine our democracy.
That part's not obvious.
But what is obvious is basically
what my wife told me when I was
telling her about the story.
She's like, Cenk,
why do you outrage that?
Conservatives, in this case, OAN,
told AT&T they'll do whatever AT&T
wants so they got money.
You tell them you won't do what
corporations want so
they don't give you money.
So well, when you put it that way,
that makes sense.
[LAUGH] On the other hand, that's
deeply corrupt, and that's why we
have the terrible media that we do.
>> And then, of course,
your wife's just like,
can you imagine the house that we
could have lived in if you started
a conservative network?
>> That's actually true.
>> [LAUGH] It's true,
I mean, we know it's true now as we
look at this.
And the other side of this,
this cries for
the FCC to get involved in labeling
what a news network is, right?
I mean, it's fine if AT&T wants to
spend the money to have diversity
of opinion on their channels.
That's fine, but they put this OAN
in their news block and
they call it news, they shouldn't
be allowed to do that so
people at least know that this is
propaganda and it's made up.
AT&T, for their part,
responded to this Reuters article.
AT&T spokesman Jim Greer disputed
that figure, the money, the 90
million in comments to Reuters,
declined to specify how much
the company has given to OAN.
It's not 90 million is what
they're saying.
It could be 91, could be 89.
We've always sought to provide
a wide variety of content and
programming that would be
of interest to customers and
do not dictate or control
programming on channels we carry.
Greer was quoted telling Reuters,
and that's exactly what I'm saying.
That's fine, they don't have to
dictate what these channels
are putting out there.
But they at least have to tell
the viewers what these channels
are and clearly what they are not,
and that's what OAN is not.
It is not news.
And I think you would agree with
that, Cenk.
>> Yeah, look, couple points here.
First, when they
dispute the figure,
that means they are not disputing
that the rest of the story is true.
So if it wasn't true at all,
they were saying,
that's outrageous.
What, you're making a deal with
these guys? That's nuts, no, we
don't give them money so that they
would do this propaganda for us.
They're not saying any of that.
They're just saying, well,
the numbers aren't exactly right.
And by the way,
it might be higher, right?
And they say,
well, we're not technically telling
them what to say.
Yeah, because that was the original
deal you made in the beginning, so
you don't have to keep repeating
it every day.
But that doesn't really
deny the story at all.
So a lot of these
decisions are deeply political.
AT&T, even from their own
non-denial denial,
clearly states that they did have
a deal like this.
And by the way, the OAN executive
said it under oath.
There's no question about it.
They said, At&T told us that we
should do positive stories about
them, and especially positive
stories about their mergers and
that we shouldn't criticize them,
and we agreed to that deal.
So that was the deal.
And they're still not denying that
portion of the deal in any
effective way, as you saw from that
quote, so- >> Yeah, they're
disputing the number, they're not
disputing anything else.
But quickly before we finish this
very quickly,
people who don't know what OAN is.
This is just an example of
the stuff that's on there.
Don't look them up, it's garbage.
The channel employs
an on-air reporter,
this is from the Huffington Post,
who was simultaneously working for
Kremlin-funded propaganda outlet
Sputnik.
And who falsely claimed that former
Democratic presidential nominee
Hillary Clinton gave antifa
protesters $800,000 for weapons.
I mean, this old cloth,
made up out of old cloth.
Far-right media activist
Jack Posobiec, who pushed
the Pizzagate conspiracy,
is a correspondent on that network.
It's not anything more than
ridiculousness.
And now we see where it comes from.
And I'm not naive enough to think
that companies don't give money
to these networks and try and
prop or prop them up.
But they have to also not say that
they allow them to say that they
are what they are not.
And that's what these
people are doing here.
That's what AT&T is doing.
And like Cenk said, when you hear
these guys talk about, when you
hear this spokesman Greer for
AT&T saying they're not disputing
what's in the story essentially by
only disputing the amount of money.
That means there's something really
bad going on.
It also means somebody else should
get the NFL package so
people don't have to have DirecTV
to watch on the NFL.
>> [LAUGH] Yeah, I agree with that,
too.
But last thing here, Michael,
they mentioned Sputnik there,
and it's funny because I
was going to use that same analogy.
So when Sputnik does obvious
propaganda for the Russian
government, we say it's bad, right?
And state-owned media is mixed.
It's a giant range, from PBS, BBC,
Al Jazeera, all the way to Sputnik,
right?
And so how much is Al Jazeera
allowed to criticize the Qatar
government?
Probably not very much at all.
On the other hand, they do some
good journalism from time to time.
BBC is funded by the British
government.
So from time to time,
they do excellent journalism.
But at the same time,
are they influenced by the fact
that they're in favor of
the British government in general?
Of course, of course, they are.
But I want you guys to understand
it really isn't much different.
Let's think the worst of actors,
Sputnik, right?
Their propaganda is brazen and
over the top, right?
But how is that different than
doing propaganda for a corporation?
It's just who you're doing
the propaganda for.
Sputnik does it for a nation state,
and OAN does it for
something arguably more powerful,
a multinational corporation.
Now those corporations are now
ruling a lot of our governments.
And it's not that surprising that
at the end, these corporate
entities that are now more powerful
than most nation states would start
to have their own
networks in order to deceive you.
The idea isn't to manufacture news,
it's to manufacture consent for
their corporate rule.