AT&T, Which Owns CNN, Helped Build Far-Right One America News | Hacker News Reader

AT&T, Which Owns CNN, Helped Build Far-Right One America News

newsandguts.com

49 pointslightlyused45 comments

Original source:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-onea...

Probably should link to that one.

This seems bogus. The quote claiming that AT&T specifically did this to push rightist propaganda is hearsay and their "contribution" was a simple deal to allow OAN on DirecTV.

By that logic, AT&T is responsible for everything bad that comes out of any of their channels on DirecTV. They're a platform and they have a duty to their shareholders to maximize revenue by platforming content creators as long as those content creators don't break the law. This is just wanton cancel culture.

AT&T wants to own & create two sides of the same coin. Not surprising.

OAN is to the right of all the major cable news networks, and CNN is the centermost of the major cable news network; that's not “two sides” of anything.

AT&T was heavily invested in the Right causes before acquiring CNN(’s parent, not CNN alone), and is investing to pushing the media space, and thus the Overton Windoe, to the Right; trying to push CNN hard directly would have visible pushback from staff and audience, shifting the ground under CNN doesn't have that problem.

Allsides (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings) rates cnn and oan on either extreme.

For sure. NPR, Newsweek, and The Christian-Science Monitor aren't centrist by the most charitable of interpretations either unless you stopped reading those publications in 2008.

Al-Jazeera (which I don't see on that list for some reason), AP, and the BBC are the only ones I'd place in that middle column. The rest have obvious agendas in my opinion (e.g. if your publication unironically uses the term "incel" to refer to any group, you're not centrist).

Wait, what's wrong with using incel to refer to a group?

They call themselves incels and congregate on message boards and subreddits devoted to that category.

No news org is just randomly finding celibate young men and labelling them incels...

Incel is a portmanteau for involuntarily celibate. That is, men/people who are (conceivably) biologically unable to find a sexual partner. The opposite of this would be a slut - a woman or people who are biologically unable to stop themselves from rejecting potential sexual partners. Slut and incel are two sides of the same token.

You can easily find women proud to call themselves sluts, both online and in reality. However, one would hope that a news organization would use more specific and less degrading terms to describe groups that they are (theoretically) neutral toward. I've certainly never seen an NPR headline use the word "slut".

However, if you look at this NPR article[0], you can be sure that it would seem silly if it read "Police Foiled An Ohio Slut's Plot To Kill Women In A Mass Shooting, Prosecutors Say". One would hope that they would use a word closer to what they were meaning to say like "4chan-viewer" or "prostitute" or "shut-in". You've gotta figure that you'd only ever use a word like "incel" if you were a biased news organization...but, of course, NPR is above that.

[0]https://www.npr.org/2021/07/22/1019089834/police-foiled-an-o...

Read your own article.

NPR is reporting that prosecutors describe him as an incel. Prosecutors say that he identifies himself as an incel and posts on incel websites.

From your own source:

> "According to the indictment reviewed by NPR, Genco maintained a profile on a popular incel website from at least July 2019 through mid-March 2020. He posted frequently on this site, it alleges."

Other outlets repeat that he self-identifies[1] as an incel and even committed a crime that pays tribute to an incel "hero" that that specific community worships for murdering people.

1. https://www.fox19.com/2021/07/21/man-scouted-ohio-college-ma...

Those other outlets didn't put "incel" in the headline though. It would have been one thing if NPR put it in quotes but they didn't - the way it's written, it sounds like they themselves are identifying the individual as an "incel" which is just as strange as if they were to identify a prostitute in a headline as a "slut". It sounds incredibly biased to use that sort of language and, at the very least, comes off as out-of-place slang.

I get what you're saying, but how is incel different from "hacker" (when Anonymous does something newsworthy) or "neo-Nazi" or "White supremacist" in situations where the subject of the article wants to be known as part of that community?

The guy in your article doesn't seem to be ashamed of the word, and its original meaning wasn't pejorative to them. It was a way to find support without shame.

Slut was always a negative word that has had to be reclaimed, and there still aren't online slut communities inspiring each other to murder innocent people.

(I'm not the one downvoting you btw)

Allsides is pretty crappy, in using big wide groupings and in how they assign them and in the lack of detail; Ad Fontes Media is much better in every way.

https://adfontesmedia.com/

Note that Allsides exists to present the news as a balance. That's what they're selling. Not that this automatically makes them wrong, but it predisposes their perspective as seeking equal and opposite dichotomies.

Just for comparison, the commonly-cited Ad Fontes chart puts CNN as "skews left" and OAN as "hyperpartisan right".

https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/?utm_source=HomePage_St...

I will note, however, that Allsides is based on the web content, not the TV content. The Ad Fontes chart puts CNN's web and TV presence in about the same place, but OAN's as just "skews right". (More to the right than CNN's left, but given the vagaries of the definitions it's reasonable to put them in the same place.

It's remarkable that they put the OAN web presence slightly to the left of Fox News. Though this puts them just straddling the line of "hyperpartisan": OAN web to the left of it, Fox to the right.

This was Murdoch's strategy; e.g., launching both Fox, with its salacious shows ("who wants to marry a millionaire," "married with children") and at the same time launching fox news, a conservative news network.

Lol so AT&T let’s them broadcast and thought it would bring in revenue? And an exec from AT&T started the station?

That’s really most of this. So what? Isn’t that the point of commerce?

Robert Herring never worked for AT&T. Before OAN, Herring Networks had one station (Wealth TV) which was carried on DirecTV. It sounds like he had a meeting with AT&T execs to discuss what type of content they'd be interested in carrying, and they said they wanted conservative news so that's what he launched. These types of meetings happen all the time.

There is zero scandal here.

I agree, my only quip — I’m the article it mentioned an AT&T executive left in 2013 to help start OAN. I’m not exactly sure what was meant there, but the article itself is my only source.

The article doesn't mention that. I think you may have misread.

Facebook: Hey, did you know that anger creates more engagement?! I'm so brilliantly evil!

AT&T: Oh please. Wait until you read my book "Destroying Democracy for Profit".

Allowing viewpoints that differ from the mainstream is now "destroying democracy"

It's all in how it's done isn't it? One way can bring greater understanding, empathy, and a sense of common purpose. Another way can stoke mistrust, resentment, and alienation. Look around you and guess which way most of American media have been choosing.

Very important story, but seems purely political and not conducive to educational, intellectual discussion. I flagged it as off-topic.

This is what is called "controlled opposition"

Eh I don't think so. AT&T aren't political ideologues pushing a specific agenda; they just don't care and want money from both sides.

I agree, it's a "traditional media" version of Facebook trying to increase engagement by enraging both sides of every political debate.

But ATT execs are too stupid to know how to make money, so they keep pissing it away in these stupid and, in this case, harmful ventures.

I have no idea how that C suite continues to be given the liberties they are since they have not made a single smart move since locking up the iPhone to ATT in 2007, and have made multiple boneheaded acquisitions and strategic moves since then.

All that money wasted could have been invested in the mobile and fiber networks, from which they could have extracted even higher rents, but they want to let Verizon beat them in that arena and instead play around in Hollywood.

Or "diversification within a sector."

Now when people get mad about one AT&T own property, they can consume the other AT&T owned property to feel agreed with.

This is like turbotax selling tax software while lobbying against simpler tax setups. Or Facebook boasting about being a townhall while optimizing for being a barbaric colosseum.

Business as usual for unfettered capitalism!

I don’t know how you can look at the telecom market and make the determination that it’s “unfettered capitalism”. AT&T has an extraordinary amount of special market privileges that shield them from competitive forces. Almost all utilities are quasi-government. That they are allowed to own private infrastructure on public land, sometimes at no cost, is something you or I could not do. Am I unaware of an important counterpoint where Soviet telecoms were high functioning and free of perverse incentives?

The title says "Reuters Special Report", but it really means "Launch of Pressure Campaign against AT&T to Cancel Bad-guy News Channel".

OAN is also a competitor to Reuters (origin of the hit piece) and Mediate (booster of hit piece in the article). Whatever you think about OAN, and even leaving the ideological differences aside, there's something so perfect about using your own news channel to bash your competitor as a "self-styled news channel" and "far-right" that needs to be taken off the air.

A alternate-universe mirror image of this article basically writes itself, delineating how the US government funds "far-left" NPR, or how various foundations and venture capitalists helped build whatever other news sites that have reported falsehoods or incited violence, and that they all need to be defunded.

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