OANN Loses Last Lifeline as Verizon Ends Carriage Deal
One America News Network just had its last major meal ticket ripped up. Thursday, Verizon announced that it would stop carrying the far-right, disinformation-drenched channel starting July 31.
“We were unable to reach an agreement to continue carrying One America News (OAN) and A Wealth of Entertainment (AWE) owned by Herring Networks after our current agreement expires on July 30, 2022,” the New York firm announced in a post on its site(Opens in a new window). “Effective July 31, 2022, we will no longer have the rights to provide this programming, and it will be removed from the Fios TV lineup.”
Verizon had been OANN’s last major TV provider after DirecTV had dumped it and AWE at the end of April. Those two deals had given this channel near-nationwide carriage and a lucrative lifeline. The DirecTV deal alone, first inked by AT&T in 2017(Opens in a new window), constituted 90% of San Diego-based Herring Networks’ income, according to court documents seen by Reuters’ John Shiffman last year(Opens in a new window).
Starting July 31, the Alaskan cable provider GCI will be the sole pay-TV service of any size to carry it–although as OANN’s pinned tweet(Opens in a new window) Friday noted, the service remains available via its app ($4.99 a month) on such streaming platforms as Roku and Apple TV.
A Verizon spokesperson said that the company dumping OANN was a strictly business proposition.
“Our negotiation with OAN has been a typical, business as usual carriage negotiation like those that routinely happen between content distributors and content providers,” this person wrote in an email. “These negotiations were focused on economics, as they always are, but OAN failed to agree to fair terms.”
Possibly also relevant: Verizon’s
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