Encouraging (at last)

 UPDATE 10/15/2025:

 

VOA will now be OAN

 

Let's be clear. VOA has always been propaganda.  It's just that now it will be MAGA bullshit propaganda.  And that's very bad.

UPDATE 10:37 am:

Smartmatic isn't stopping with Fox

In the wake of the 2020 election, the president of the far-right network One America News sent a potentially explosive email to former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, with a spreadsheet claiming to contain passwords of employees from the voting technology company Smartmatic, according to court filings.

[...]

OAN has established itself as perhaps the most extreme of the pro-Trump news outlets.

[...]

The little-watched network regularly gives airtime to baseless conspiracy theories that support Trump. The channel even worked closely with Russian operatives on a propaganda-style documentary during Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 over allegations he pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. One of its correspondents, who is also an attorney, even worked with Trump’s legal team to subvert the 2020 election results.

[...]

Lawyers from Smartmatic told a federal judge that the email, and the attached spreadsheet, suggest OAN executives “may have engaged in criminal activities” because they “appear to have violated state and federal laws regarding data privacy.”

[...]

According to court filings, the supposed passwords were shared around the same time that Powell, her associates and other Trump supporters were trying to improperly access voting systems across the country, to prove their false claims of voter fraud.

[...]

The revelations were surfaced by Smartmatic as part of an effort to convince the judge in its case against OAN that the network is withholding key documents in the discovery process.

[...]

Smartmatic has sued OAN, Powell, and other Trump allies and right-wing outlets, seeking billions of dollars in damages for their 2020 election lies. After former President Donald Trump lost the election, they spread baseless claims that election software from Smartmatic and another company flipped millions of votes from Trump to Joe Biden.

[...]

OAN settled a defamation suit in September with former Dominion executive Eric Coomer, whose case revealed how the network worked closely with Powell and others to lie about the election. DirecTV has also dropped the far-right network from its lineup, dealing a significant blow to the outlet, hitting the network’s viewership and revenue.

  CNN

Maybe Smartmatic's lawsuit will put the final nail in OAN's coffin.

A few names seem to be missing

What, no Carlson? No Hannity?  No Bartiromo?  Mike Lindell has already started liquidating My Pillow.  

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

One small step for mankind

Will Walmart repackage all those TVs or put them on sale?

Dominion lawsuit to go ahead

In June, Dominion Voting Systems, which provided voting machines to 28 states, was given the go-ahead to sue Fox Corp, the parent company of Fox News, in a case that could draw Rupert Murdoch and his son, Lachlan, into the spotlight.

In the $1.6bn lawsuit, Dominion accuses Fox Corp, and the Murdochs specifically, of allowing Fox News to amplify false claims that the voting company had rigged the election for Joe Biden.

Fox Corp had attempted to have the suit dismissed, but a Delaware judge said Dominion had shown adequate evidence for the suit to proceed. Dominion is already suing Fox News, as well as OAN and Newsmax.

  Guardian

I hope all those Fox fiends spouting on air are named in the suit.

Davis’s ruling is not a guarantee that Fox will be found liable. But the judge made it clear that this isn’t some frivolous attempt by Dominion – and media and legal experts think Fox could be in real trouble.

“Dominion has a very strong case against Fox News – and against OAN for that matter,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a professor who teaches constitutional law at Stetson University and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute.

[...]

“What’s particularly bad for Fox is [that] Dominion asked them to stop and correct the record in real time, and Fox persisted in spreading misrepresentations about the voting machine company.”

[...]

Dominion isn’t the only company seeking damages from Fox and its contemporaries.

Smartmatic, an election software company which provided voting software to precisely one county in the 2020 election but found itself subjected to claims that it was founded “for the specific purpose of fixing elections” by associates of Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela who died in 2013, is suing Fox Corp, Fox News and associates for $2.7bn.

[...]

Fox News is the most-watched and arguably most influential cable news channel in the US, and is probably too big to fail.

But that isn’t the case for the smaller rightwing networks OAN and Newsmax, which are also both being sued by Dominion and Smartmatic.

[...]

“I think OAN is going to be wiped out from the litigation costs. Forget about any judgment,” said Angelo Carusone, president and chief executive of Media Matters for America, which monitors rightwing media.

Carusone pointed out that OAN is already struggling to survive, after it was dropped by the DirecTV cable company – which was reportedly responsible for 90% of OAN’s revenue – in April.

“We’ve started seeing, already, them scaling back programming, they’ve been laying off staff, they’ve been cutting back the number of programs. So it’s pretty clear that they don’t have sufficient resources to weather a protracted litigation.”

Newsmax, which is still carried by DirecTV, is “relatively cash flush” in comparison to OAN, Carusone said – enough to survive a trial, if not to pay the billions of dollars Dominion and Smartmatic are seeking.

[...]

As for Fox, the most significant thing could be if the Murdochs are subjected to discovery – where they and Fox could be forced to hand over documents potentially including communications data – as part of the legal process, Carusone said.

Come April, OAN distribution will be downsized

DirecTV, which is owned by AT&T Inc. and TPG Inc., told The Hill they have notified Herring Networks Inc., the owner of OAN, that the contract between network and the service provider will not be renewed [in April 2022].

[...]

DirecTV is its largest distributor. Verizon Fios and smaller carries have maintained OAN, and it is available to stream online through KloudTV.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

OAN staff doesn't even believe OAN's bullshit

In interviews with 18 current and former OAN newsroom employees, 16 said the channel had broadcast reports that they considered misleading, inaccurate or untrue.

[...]

The channel did not broadcast live coverage of Mr. Biden’s swearing-in ceremony and Inaugural Address. Into April, news articles on the OAN website consistently referred to Donald J. Trump as “President Trump” and to President Biden as just “Joe Biden” or “Biden.”

[...]

OAN has also promoted the debunked theory that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were left-wing agitators.

[...]

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.

  NYT

America's Murdochs

During the Trump presidency, [OAN] moved right, [Marty Golingan, a producer at the channel since 2016,] said. And when he was watching coverage of the pro-Trump mob breaking into the Capitol, he said, he worried that his work might have helped inspire the attack.

He added that he and others at OAN disagreed with much of the channel’s coverage. “The majority of people did not believe the voter fraud claims being run on the air,” Mr. Golingan said in an interview, referring to his colleagues.

He recalled seeing a photo of someone in the Capitol mob holding a flag emblazoned with the OAN logo. “I was like, OK, that’s not good,” Mr. Golingan said. “That’s what happens when people listen to us.”

[...]

Mr. Golingan added that, since Inauguration Day, OAN’s news director, Lindsay Oakley, had reprimanded him for referring to Mr. Biden as “President Biden” in news copy.

[...]

In a survey last month, Pew Research reported that 7 percent of Americans, including 14 percent of Republicans, had gotten political news from OAN. By contrast, 43 percent of Americans and 62 percent of Republicans had gotten political news from Fox News, the survey found.

Am I to understand that the other 30+ percent of Republicans don't get any political news at all? Or they just didn't want to say?

In a Reuters/Ipsos poll last month, about half of Republicans said they believed that the Jan. 6 attack, which left five dead, was largely a nonviolent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists. Six in 10 of Republicans surveyed said they also believed Mr. Trump’s claim that the election was “stolen.”

[...]

In a mid-November promotional ad, OAN accused Fox News of joining “the mainstream media in censoring factual reporting.”

[...]

The day after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Herring instructed OAN employees in an email, which The New York Times reviewed, to “report all the things Antifa did yesterday.”

[...]

Some [stories] are reported by Kristian Rouz, an OAN correspondent who had written for Sputnik, a site backed by the Russian government. In a report in May on the pandemic, Mr. Rouz said Covid-19 might have started as a “globalist conspiracy to establish sweeping population control,” one that had ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, the billionaires George Soros and Bill Gates, and “the deep state.”

Ms. Britton, the former OAN producer, recalled checking a website that Mr. Rouz had cited to back some of his reporting. “It literally took me to this chat room where it’s just conservatives commenting toward each other,” she said.

[...]

Herring confirmed that about a dozen OAN workers had left in recent months, saying many of them were not high-level employees.

....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

On Trump TV

America 2020 has jumped the shark

UPDATE:

Last month, [Antonio Mugica, a young Venezuelan software engineer,] initially took it in stride when his company’s name started popping up in grief-addled Trump supporters’ wild conspiracy theories about the election.

[...]

But by Nov. 14, he knew he had a problem. That’s when Rudy Giuliani, serving as the president’s lawyer, suggested that one voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, had a sinister connection to vote counts in “Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states.”

[...]

Soon his company, and a competitor, Dominion — which sells its services to about 1,900 of the county governments that administer elections across America — were at the center of Mr. Giuliani’s and Sidney Powell’s theories, and on the tongues of commentators on Fox News and its farther-right rivals, Newsmax and One America News.

[...]

Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business reported on Nov. 15 that “one source says that the key point to understand is that the Smartmatic system has a backdoor.”

[...]

Smartmatic wasn’t even used in the contested states. The company, now a major global player with over 300 employees, pulled out of the United States in 2007 after a controversy over its founders’ Venezuelan roots, and its only involvement this November was with a contract to help Los Angeles County run its election.

[...]

Last week, [Mugica's] lawyer sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name — and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case. And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017.

[...]

“We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this,” Mr. Connolly said.

[...]

Mr. Mugica isn’t the only potential plaintiff. Dominion Voting Systems has [...] threatened legal action against Ms. Powell and the Trump campaign.

  NYT

Hit 'em hard or it won't hurt.q

These are legal threats any company, even a giant like Fox Corporation, would take seriously. And they could be fatal to the dream of a new “Trump TV,” a giant new media company in the president’s image, and perhaps contributing to his bottom line. Newsmax and OAN would each like to become that, and are both burning money to steal ratings from Fox, executives from both companies have acknowledged. They will need to raise significantly more money, or to sell quickly to investors, to build a Fox-style multibillion-dollar empire. But outstanding litigation with the potential of an enormous verdict will be enough to scare away most buyers.

[...]

OAN and Newsmax have been avidly hyping Mr. Trump’s bogus election claims. OAN has even been trying to get to Newsmax’s right, by continuing to reject Joe Biden’s status as president-elect. But their own roles in propagating that lie could destroy their businesses if Mr. Mugica sues.

Do it, Tony. Do it for the world.

[Floyd Abrams, one of the country’s most prominent First Amendment lawyers,] noted that “truth is always a defense” and that, failing that, the networks may defend themselves by saying they didn’t know the charges were false, while Ms. Powell may say she was simply describing legal filings.

“It is far too early to predict how the cases, if commenced, will end,” he said. “But it is not too early to say that they would be highly dangerous to those sued.”

[...]

Fox News and Fox Business, which have mentioned Dominion 792 times and Smartmatic 118 times between them, according to a search of the service TVEyes, appear to be taking the threat seriously. Over the weekend, they broadcast one of the strangest three-minute segments I’ve ever seen on television, with a disembodied and anonymous voice flatly asking a series of factual questions about Smartmatic of an expert on voting machines, Eddie Perez, who debunks a series of false claims. The segment, which appeared scripted to persuade a very literal-minded judge or jury that the network was being fair, aired over the weekend on the shows hosted by Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, where Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell had made their most outlandish claims.

[...]

I’m reluctant to cheer on a defamation case against news organizations, even networks that appear to be amplifying dangerous lies. Companies and politicians often exploit libel law to threaten and silence journalists, and at the very least subject them to expensive and draining litigation.

And defamation cases can also collide with subjects of genuine public interest, as in the most prominent case I’ve been involved in, when a businessman sued me and my colleagues at BuzzFeed News for publishing the Steele Dossier, while acknowledging that it was unverified. There, a judge ruled that the document was an official record that BuzzFeed was entitled to publish.

If a news organization is guilty of defamation, it should be sued.

Mr. Mugica wouldn’t say whether he has made up his mind to sue. Mr. Connolly said that he has “a lot of people watching a lot of videos right now,” and that he’s researching whether to file in New York, Florida or elsewhere. I asked Mr. Mugica if he’d settle for an apology.

“Is the apology going to reverse the false belief of tens of millions of people who believe in these lies?” he asked. “Then I could be satisfied.”

I think we know the answer to that question.

UPDATE:  Newsmax is on it, too.

The urge to control the news

And here it is on Trump TV

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump TV is a thing

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump's favorite "news" source OANN

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

As Kevin Kruse says...

...Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

From Trump's new favorite station

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump News Network bringing Ukrainians to the US

Before catching the eye of German law enforcement, former Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleksandr Onyshchenko drew attention from the conservative TV channel One America News. Last week, German authorities arrested the multi-millionaire because of a warrant from Ukrainian anti-corruption prosecutors. Before his arrest, though, the Trump-friendly media outlet tried to help him get a visa to travel to the U.S.

The effort, which has not been previously reported, was part of a push by OAN to unearth information on Burisma Holdings, the energy company that retained Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President and current Trump rival Joe Biden. Onyshchenko has claimed to have dirt on the firm.

[...]

[N]etwork president Charles Herring told The Daily Beast in an email [...] “One America News Network made the request prior to Mr. Onyschchenko being detained. One America News investigative efforts have cost in excess of $100,000 to date.”

  Daily Beast

But was it before it was known he was going to be detained?

Herring added that the outlet is also “currently seeking visas” for several other former Ukrainian officials, but is no longer doing so for Onyshchenko. Herring declined to say which other ex-officials his outlet is trying to secure visas for.

Whichever other ones are in danger of being arrested, or, all corrupt officials that were drummed out of the government with Zelensky's election.

Efforts by media outlets to secure legal travel authorizations for their sources are in an ethical gray area, according to one expert. Especially when the source in question is accused of embezzlement.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Why is Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine right now?

President Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani has refused to explain why he has traveled to Ukraine this week, even as House investigators pore over his boss's alleged efforts to extort the government in Kiev to interfere in the 2020 elections.

According to The New York Times, Giuliani traveled to Kiev Wednesday to meet with former Ukrainian prosecutors, including Viktor Shokin, whose 2016 firing sits at the heart of corruption conspiracy theories leveled at 2020 Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden.

The Times reported that Giuliani's latest trip to Ukraine was part of his work on a new pro-Trump documentary series that will be critical of the impeachment investigation into the president. The series is being produced by the right-wing cable channel One America News.

  Ukraine

In case you've missed it, that's Trump's replacement for Fox News since Fox has quit giving him complete ass cover in its news department.

Speaking with "America This Week" host Eric Bolling on Wednesday, Giuliani accidentally confirmed his presence in Ukraine though refused to say why he was there.

"Well, I can't really describe it...I can't even confirm it," Giuliani said when asked about his purpose in the country.

"All I can tell you is that I am doing today—all day, and all night maybe—what I've been doing for a year and a half. I'm representing my client as a lawyer."

[...]

He later let slip that he was, in fact, in Ukraine. Bolling asked Giuliani whether he was in the country to gather evidence to support claims of innocence, to which the former New York mayor replied, "I am not here to...," before pausing and rewording his response.

"I don't have to defend myself," Giuliani said. "I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do a darn thing wrong." He described the allegations against him regarding Ukraine as "completely untrue."

Somebody want to check whether that was a one-way ticket Rudy went on?  Or was it a private flight?

From a Stanford speech yesterday by Serhiy Leschenko, who originally advised Zelensky, talking about the corrupt Ukrainian ex-prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko:

And I have a theory on that.  He was taking out the Italian mafia in New York to make room for the Russian mafia in New York.  And I'd further suggest that some of his information against the Italians came from the Russians.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Yeah, who IS paying for all this?  My guess is the Trump campaign.  I hear they're flush to overflowing.

UPDATE:

Trump's new favorite news outlet

He's been praising OANN now that Fox doesn't provide enough sycophancy.



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Mooch has joined The Resistance

Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said on Monday that he’s assembling a team of former Cabinet members to speak out against President Trump in an effort to find a Republican challenger to the president in 2020.

“I'm in the process of putting together a team of people that feel the exact same way that I do. This is not a ‘Never Trump’ situation, this is not just screeching rhetoric. This is, 'OK, the guy's unstable, everyone inside knows it, everyone outside knows it, let’s see if we can find a viable alternative,'” Scaramucci said Monday on CNN’s “New Day.”

[...]

“I predict in middle or late fall there will be a trove of people that will come together in unity to say this is what’s going on. This is how the person’s acting. This is why there’s nobody inside the White House he’s taking any advice from,” Scaramucci said.

  The Hill

I think you can hold out less hope of a Scaramucci rescue than you could of a Mueller one - much less - but it's good for a Twitter feud.




You made him your communications director.

Also joining the resistance movement:  The New York Times.

In a sweeping and ambitious journalistic project, the New York Times on Sunday launched its [Project] 1619 series, reframing the American story around a single, pivotal historical event: the arrival to America 400 years ago this month of the first enslaved Africans.

The premise of the groundbreaking initiative unveiled in the pages of the Sunday magazine is that the arrival of these captured Africans was the defining moment of American history.

[...]

Needless to say, conservatives — many of whom can probably safely be considered Euro-centrists — simply weren’t having it.

They revolted loudly against the notion that 1619, and not 1776, would be viewed as the seminal date in American history. And they seemed particularly nonplussed at the idea that African Americans, and not white Americans, were being put forward as the key contributors to the nation’s rich cultural heritage.

[...]

“How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years,” [New York Times editor-in-chief Dean] Baquet said, according to a leaked transcript of his remarks obtained by Slate.

  Think Progress

"Openly revel in being partisan."  You mean like Fox News?  Or Breitbart or OANN?





What does that "hopefully" refer to?  I'm assuming he would have placed it next to "out of business" if he had any knowledge of the proper use of grammar, but as it stands, it looks like it refers to him leaving office in 6 years.  Hopefully, indeed.

They'll endorse him!  Good one, Asshat.

UPDATE:









UPDATE:



UPDATE: