Trump’s Favorite TV Network Is Post-parody
One America News, or OAN, or OANN—whichever you like, it’s all the same thing—is Donald Trump’s favorite cable-news channel. Mostly this is because One America News seems to agree with Trump about everything, in the same way a dog agrees to chase its own tail. Every day, Trump does something that catches OAN’s attention, and it’s off to the races. He’s part ringleader, part muse. If you’re wondering just how deep the fealty goes, consider this actual headline that ran on oann.com at the end of March, when Trump was still in his denial phase about the coronavirus: “President Handling Emergency Well in First Term.” So well, in fact, we should just give him that second term right now, wouldn’t you say? Every so often, Trump and Fox News have a lover’s spat, and this is when he really turns on the charm toward OAN—retweeting its praise of him, calling on its correspondents at press briefings two days in a row. Or, to put the relationship in tabloid terms familiar to Trump: He treats OAN like his sidepiece, and Fox News like a future ex-wife.
One America News predates the Trump presidency—it launched in 2013—so its rise is less a response to Trumpism than an extension of the besieged, paranoid worldview that got him elected in the first place. In 2018, well after the debunking of Pizzagate—the allegation that Hillary Clinton and a secret cabal were running a pedophile ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant—the network hired one of Pizzagate’s chief boosters, Jack Posobiec, as an on-air correspondent. (Posobiec has backed down from the Pizzagate theory, telling in 2016 that he thought his live-streamed look into the pizzeria “could just show it was a regular pizza place.”) OAN covered the so-called migrant caravan—a slow-moving wave of migrants that began rolling north from Central America in 2018—as if it were a Category 5 hurricane. OAN has referred to the 2016 murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee employee, as if it might have been a political assassination; tin-foil-hat corners of the reported that administration officials were pushing the intelligence services to investigate, even as the theory was debunked on the front page.
