One America News

What you're reading

One America News Network (OAN, also OANN) is a 24-hour cable news channel founded in 2013 by Robert Herring Sr. and his sons Charles and Robert Jr., operating out of San Diego with a Washington, DC studio. It launched as an explicitly conservative alternative to Fox News and built its audience during the first Trump administration by offering coverage friendlier to the White House than Fox at the time.

OAN distribution shrank dramatically in 2022 when DirecTV and Verizon Fios dropped the channel, citing carriage-fee disputes; the network now reaches a much smaller cable footprint plus a paid streaming app. Programming consists of straight-format hourly newscasts, opinion shows including Real America with Dan Ball and Tipping Point with Kara McKinney, and political coverage that has prominently featured 2020-election fraud claims. Audience is small relative to Fox, MSNBC or CNN — typically a few tens of thousands of average viewers per show — but politically motivated.

Ownership & funding

Herring Networks, Inc. (private; Robert Herring). Funded primarily through ad-supported + subscription.

Ad-supported plus subscription with a private family owner who is openly politically committed produces an unusual incentive structure: the Herrings have subsidized OAN through years where carriage cutoffs would have killed a normal commercial outlet, and editorial direction is set by ownership in ways that are openly acknowledged rather than firewalled. The carriage losses (DirecTV, Verizon) removed most of the channel's reliable revenue base, which has pushed the operation toward a smaller-but-paying direct-subscriber model and toward content choices optimized for that audience's preferences rather than for broad reach or advertiser comfort.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places One America News at Right with a factuality rating of Low.

nwsly places One America News at Right because the channel's news framing, story selection and on-air commentary are uniformly aligned with the Trump-era populist right, with effectively no breaks in the pattern across newscasts or opinion shows. Coverage treats Donald Trump favorably as a baseline, treats Democratic officials as adversaries by default, and has at length amplified claims about the 2020 election that other US news outlets have rejected as unsupported by evidence. Hard immigration framing, COVID-vaccine skepticism, and hostility to mainstream-media peers are recurring features.

The Low factuality rating reflects multiple defamation lawsuits — Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic both sued OAN over 2020-election coverage, with Dominion's case settled in 2024 — plus repeated on-air claims that fact-checkers have rated false or misleading. The pattern is not occasional error; it is sustained advocacy framed as news, with limited correction infrastructure. The Right rating reflects that even by the standards of partisan US cable, OAN's news/opinion blend is more thoroughly slanted than most peers.

Editorial vs news side

OAN does not maintain a meaningful news/opinion split. Hourly newscasts use straight-news format conventions but framing and sourcing track the opinion shows closely; opinion hosts appear in news contexts and vice versa. The product is opinion-first with a news veneer, which is what cable conservative-populist programming has converged on more broadly. The Right bias rating and Low factuality rating both reflect the whole channel rather than separating news and opinion.

Why we include them in nwsly

Cable news network founded in 2013.

OAN earns its slot in nwsly because the populist-right cable ecosystem — Newsmax, OAN, the post-2020 right-of-Fox space — is a real and politically consequential information environment that mainstream Lean Right and Right outlets in nwsly's lineup don't capture. Including OAN gives readers exposure to how that ecosystem frames the day's stories, which often diverges sharply from the rest of US media. nwsly briefs treat OAN sourcing with the Low-factuality flag visible to readers.

Recent nwsly briefs citing One America News

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