OAN officially dropped by Verizon, sparking financial troubles

Verizon has dropped OAN (One American News) from their programming schedule. Verizon emailed a statement to TheWrap to confirm that their relationship with OAN has now been severed.

“Our negotiation with OAN has been a typical, business as usual carriage negotiation like those that routinely happen between content distributors and content providers. These negotiations were focused on economics, as they always are, but OAN failed to agree to fair terms,” Verizon said.

They elaborated further, saying: “Our company has long advocated for providing customers with the ability to choose what content they want to watch, and our Fios TV platform offers a wide and diverse choice of programming options, including a la carte options, that strive to meet our millions of customers’ various content needs and preferences.”

The agreement formally concluded at the end of July. “Since we were unable to reach an agreement, effective July 31, 2022, we will no longer have the rights to provide our customers with this programming, and it will be removed from the Fios TV lineup,” the statement confirmed.

According to the OAN website, they are now available on one cable network, Alaska-based GCI, and also on 2 streaming services, these being KlowdTV and Vidgo.

OAN are also facing a lawsuit, which was filed by Dominion Voting Systems. This lawsuit alleges that OAN made false statements about their voting systems in the 2020 election. The lawsuit, which has named OAN reporters Chanel Rion and Christina Bobb, states that the network “recklessly disregarded the truth; indeed, OAN knew the statements it repeatedly broadcast about Dominion were lies.”

Yosef Getachew, who is the the media and democracy program director at a government watchdog firm Common Cause praised the decision saying it was better late than never.

“One America News will be left without a major carrier to spread its often harmful and dangerous disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories. This is a welcome change but long overdue,” Getachew said. “No company should profit from spreading content that endangers our democracy.”