#graham ledger

OAN: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [source]

One America News, or OAN, is a far-right news network being embraced by President Trump at his coronavirus press briefings.  John Oliver takes a look at who they are, how they report, and why they could be a big problem during the pandemic.  [18 mins]

Felix Gillette and Gerry Smith at Bloomberg:

Dan Ball, a host for One America News Network, looked disgusted. It was Tuesday, Sept. 29, and the first debate between President Trump and Joe Biden had just ended. Across social media, people were criticizing the moderator, veteran Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who’d struggled to control the proceedings. Now Ball wanted to take a whack for OAN, a slavishly pro-Trump cable channel that’s been positioning itself as more loyal to the MAGA cause than Fox News.

Ball pulled out a box of tissues. “I brought something with me for Chris Wallace,” he said. “Chris should use that to get the brown stuff off of his nose.” For the next half-hour, OAN’s panel of analysts piled on. Wallace, they agreed, had been incredibly favorable to Biden, failing to fact-check his falsehoods, parroting Democratic talking points, and letting him interrupt and insult Trump. Still, the commentators said, Trump had performed admirably. He had better points to make and more specific facts. He was more natural onstage and stronger on the economy, voting fraud, taxes, crime, and the coronavirus.

By proxy, Fox News was the night’s big loser. Ball noted that “a lot of people” think Fox leans right. “Not so much anymore,” he said. “You have an anchor right there who was obviously favoring the Democratic candidate.”

Since taking office, President Trump has ushered into Washington a baroque procession of louche political operatives and oddball supplicants unlike anything seen in prior administrations. In the news business, OAN has been the single most jarring arriviste. The network, which started broadcasting in 2013, has managed to claw its way out of the cable news hinterland of San Diego and into the White House briefing room. Trump regularly calls on its reporters and touts it on Twitter, holding it up as a worthy alternative to Fox.

OAN doesn’t subscribe to Nielsen, so data about its audience size is something of a mystery. Kagan, the media research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence, says the network reaches 23.1 million pay-TV subscribers. That’s far fewer than Newsmax TV (58.2 million) or Fox News (78.6 million), but OAN has nevertheless more than doubled its advertising revenue over the past two years, to an estimated $13.3 million. The channel is brimming with ads from companies hoping to sell things to Trump fans. On a recent afternoon, it featured commercials for Henry Repeating Arms, a shotgun and rifle maker; Trump Card, a documentary by conservative polemicist Dinesh D’Souza; and MyCleanPC.com, a hard-drive-scrubbing service.

Trump’s affinity for the network is proving to be its own kind of currency—albeit one that might seem at risk of serious devaluation. As the election looms, OAN faces a crucial test: Can it capitalize on the next act of its beloved protagonist, whether it’s a second term or a post-presidency?

Some industry observers have speculated that, if Trump loses, he could acquire Herring Networks Inc., the little-known company that owns OAN, and turn the channel into his own TV network, siphoning off die-hard MAGA-heads and QAnon fanatics as Fox embraces whatever comes next from the establishment GOP. While it might be impossible to outflank prime-time hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on the right, Fox’s daytime hours are filled with less partisan voices, potentially leaving an opening. “Fox News, even under Roger Ailes, had a track record of being very pro-establishment,” says Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign adviser. “A major syndicated network for conservative news media would certainly have a tangible market to compete against Fox during the daytime.”

[...]

In 2008, Mr. H started his first daily news show, Wealth International News, filling it mostly with repackaged wire service segments. It was anchored by Graham Ledger, a tanned, muscular San Diego newsman who’d spent years at KFMB-TV, the local CBS affiliate. Ledger was known behind the scenes at KFMB as a vocal conservative who would scour scripts for signs of liberal bias. (He didn’t respond to interview requests.)

Five years after his first foray into news, in the spring of 2013, Mr. H announced he was starting a competitor to Fox News called One America News Network. OAN began broadcasting that July 4. The network’s logo was an eagle with wings outstretched, talons descending. The graphics were red, white, and blue.

News programming continued to revolve around dutiful setups of wire service segments, but now Mr. H had an opinion side, too. Ledger moved there and began hosting a show called The Daily Ledger, featuring his signature opening line: “Stand by. The doors to the newsroom are locked, and the PC police are not getting in.”

OAN, like WealthTV, struggled to attract major cable distributors. Staffers started calling the network One America Snooze. In its efforts to gain notice, OAN brought in Sarah Palin for a guest-hosting stint in the summer of 2015. At one point, she did an obsequious interview with candidate Trump, in which she praised his “avant-garde” campaign and asked him where he “got his guts” when it came to schooling certain “idiots” in the mainstream media. Afterward, Charles Herring told CNN he wanted to hire Palin but couldn’t yet “afford what she is worth.”

Trump, on the other hand, was endlessly jawboning for free—the perfect budgetary and stylistic fit for Mr. H. Soon, OAN was gaining notice on the campaign trail by airing Trump rallies, unabridged. Any Trump fan annoyed by the reality-based political interjections of Fox reporters now had a genuine alternative.

Once Trump gained office, OAN spiraled into a firenado of MAGA-friendly content. According to former employees, Mr. H involved himself deeply in the process, combing through right-wing websites for ideas and assigning stories. At some point, he dutifully performed the MAGA hajj, traveling to stay in the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., which he was aghast to find didn’t subscribe to OAN. He duly complained on Twitter.

In 2018, Jonathan Harris, a former OAN producer, filed a discrimination and harassment lawsuit against Herring Networks and Ledger. According to the lawsuit, Ledger would regularly “berate, demean and verbally abuse” Harris over his liberal politics and his “perspectives as an African-American male.” Harris claimed that when he filed a formal complaint about Ledger’s allegedly racist behavior, Herring grew angry and fired him. In court documents, Herring and Ledger responded that the claims were without merit, but in early 2020 a jury found in Harris’s favor, awarding him $1.1 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Several months later, Ledger left OAN, ostensibly to spend more time with his podcast.

Meanwhile, the network was playing host to various members of the Trump demimonde. Herring briefly hired former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a political commentator, and OAN aired several documentaries and specials involving Trump associates, including Carter Page, Steve Bannon, Michael Caputo, and Rudy Giuliani. The multipart series featuring Giuliani aired during Trump’s impeachment hearings, advancing the false notion that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and on Hillary Clinton’s, not Trump’s, behalf.

Over time, the line between the network’s commentators and news reporters all but disappeared. In 2019, OAN hired Chanel Rion, a conservative illustrator (“President Trump’s most stalwart graphic warrior against leftism,” per her website), as its White House correspondent. She’s since emerged as the defiant, maskless face of the network’s pandemic coverage—tangling over Covid safety protocols with the White House Correspondents’ Association, promoting the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a North Carolina lab, and posing some memorably bizarre questions. “Is it alarming that major media players, just to oppose you, are siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals, and Latin gangs and cartels?” she asked Trump in March. (Rion didn’t respond to an interview request.)

All the while, OAN’s reputation grew stronger among hardcore Trump fans—and the people hoping to profit from them. In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that Hicks Equity Partners LLC, an investment firm based in Dallas, was trying to assemble a bid of roughly $250 million to acquire Herring Networks. Even by Trump-era standards, the deal had the air of a nepotistic feeding frenzy. According to the Journal, Thomas Hicks Jr. (son of the firm’s superwealthy founder) is friends with Donald Trump Jr. (son of the president) and was being backed by Doug Deason (son of billionaire Darwin Deason). “With the 2020 political season in full swing, expressed interest is on the rise,” Charles Herring told the Journal. “Yet our family didn’t build our operations to sell it.” (A representative for Hicks Equity Partners declined to comment. Deason didn’t respond to an interview request.)

If Trump wins, OAN would appear well-positioned to capitalize further on its relationship with the president. “Herring Networks Inc. is profitable, has no debt, and is growing,” Charles Herring wrote to Bloomberg Businessweek, adding that “2020 is expected to be a strong year for the company, with record top and bottom line results, driven by increases in ad sales and digital deployments across numerous platforms.”

Even so, it faces a daunting set of challenges. The cable industry is rapidly contracting. Many beloved brands are losing large chunks of their audiences to streaming competitors. And unlike, say, Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., which owns or operates nearly 200 broadcast-TV stations it can inject with conservative views, Mr. H is dependent on satellite- and cable-TV providers. In recent years, those companies have been trimming away underperforming channels to keep costs down.

OAN’s frequent pleas to viewers to badger one cable company or another to pick it up haven’t helped it get carriage from several of the giant pay-TV providers, notably Comcast, Charter Communications, and Dish Network. And its largest distributor, AT&T Inc.’s DirecTV, is swiftly losing customers. Herring Networks does own a boutique streaming service called KlowdTV, but it currently provides subscribers with access only to a range of lesser-known outlets, including OAN, AWE (“A Wealth of Entertainment,” the rebranded name of WealthTV), the Nautical Channel, Infowars, and Horse.TV.

Transcript, via MMFA:

GRAHAM LEDGER (HOST): It was Martin Luther King, Jr. using that constitutionally-based axiom to lead this republic away from laws that leaders who inhibited liberty, freedom, equal protection, and ultimately God-given rights. It was King doing so correctly. He defied radical politicians. He stood his ground against prejudicial decrees that trampled on the constitutional rights of American citizens. Well, If MLK were alive today, then what would he say about forcing people to abandon their First Amendment rights, hmmh? What would King say about denying my right to assemble? What would Martin Luther King Jr. say and what would he do to these spineless Catholic priests and bishops? Would King do what most churches are doing and simply abandon the right to practice religion? Simply capitulate to one man or one woman who just happens to have the title "Governor"? I don’t think so. No, I think MLK would not only be speaking out, but he would be acting out through civil disobedience.

...

This is a full-blown, five-star constitutional nightmare. So where is the hope? Where is the resistance? Well, there is hope, and there must be resistance. This hope resides deep inside each and every patriotic American who can see the big constitutional picture here. These are thinking Americans who understand that what Martin Luther King Jr. executed fifty-something years ago must be replicated right here, right now.

And one of these patriotic Americans is a guy from New York who goes by the name of Donald Trump. President Trump is being politically overwhelmed right now by a bunch of partisan hack blue state governors who are slow-walking any form of reopening their states. Why? Because of a virus? Please! Please!

Even you doubters, when I was blasting this entire episode back in early March, when this first started, you folks know now, don't you, this entire government response to the Wuhan coronavirus is not about health. It's about defeating President Trump in November. And if these governors succeed in keeping businesses closed through the summer, I really hate to say this, I really do. But they're going to succeed, folks.

So what does the president have to lose here? Donald Trump should immediately and radically enforce the "commerce clause" of the United States Constitution. Cuomo and Newsom and Pritzker and Northam and company are in violation, clearly, of the commerce clause. There is no debate. Issue a cease-and-desist order to all of them. Demand that they allow residents of their respective states to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, A.K.A. commerce. Yes, demand that they reopen. And if they do not comply, then the Justice Department will issue arrest warrants for these governors and while federalizing local sheriffs and the president to send in the National Guard.

Sound outrageous? Well, how would you describe what's happening to more than one-third of our population right now? Which leads me to the other patriotic thinking Americans who need to act now, with or without the president's enforcement of the commerce clause. It is time, Los Angeles. It is time, Pittsburgh. It is time, Buffalo. It is time, Virginia Beach, it is time Rockford. It is time, Lansing. It is time for resistance. Defiance. Open up, California. Open up, Pennsylvania, open up, Illinois. Our forefathers risked their lives for us. This is our moment to risk it all for future Americans because, because it is our moral responsibility to defy unjust, unfair, and un-constitutional edicts from government.

So what do you think, Detroit? Hmmh? Have you had enough of this radical nut case anti-constitutional governor of yours yet?

[CLIP STARTS]

MICHIGAN GOV GRETCHEN WHITMER: What we need to do is continue what we have done. It's working. And --

[CLIP ENDS]

LEDGER: Stop tape. Something in her eyes -- she's got the crazy eyes. But she's infecting millions and millions of Michigan residents with those infectious eyes.

...

[CLIP STARTS]

MICHIGAN GOV GRETCHEN WHITMER: For people that want to voice their frustration, that's fine. But I expect people to follow the law. These executive orders are not a suggestion.

[CLIP ENDS]

LEDGER: Stop the tape. She's saying that her orders, one person, in a state with millions of people, one person issuing orders -- not following the state constitution, not following the federal constitution -- one person issuing orders, Governor Whitman has the power to control all of these people and it's tantamount to law, tantamount to law.

This is why the president of the United States must act. Because these governors like Whitman and the crazies in Pennsylvania, and in Virginia, and in North Carolina, and in New Mexico, and in Colorado and Alaska and Washington state and Oregon and California, they're not going to let go of their grip until after the election, they're not going to let go of their stranglehold on their economies until they know that Donald Trump has been exposed as much as possible to a terrible economy and it'll affect the voting pattern in November. They're not going to let go of their grip of power. They're not going to do this.

The president must act. He has nothing to lose and everything to gain, called the United States Constitution.

From the 05.13.2020 edition of One America News Network's The Daily Ledger: 

Transcript, via MMFA: 

Our cover story: The continued crushing of economy, crushing of lives, crushing of livelihoods, and crushing of liberty. Yes, Madame Mayor, we know your message: Stay at home, don't go to work, be afraid.

This is the coordinated refrain from all the blue city mayors who take their marching orders from blue-state governors who take their marching orders from the Democrat machine.

I'm going to use an ugly word here: Conspiracy. At this point, based on all the evidence, all the scientific data, and what we have learned about the Wuhan coronavirus, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this has been a governmental overreaction, on purpose, politically motivated, from day one. These mayors and governors are lying to their people. This shutdown is not about peoples' health, it's not. It's about politics and political power. Sheer, raw, unadulterated power.

...

And so this is the paradox that has been established by these anti-Trump partisans. They keep calling for more and more testing. "We need more," they claim. Well, how much more? Well, the answer keeps changing, keeps growing.

But the paradox is, and they know this, the more they test, the more confirmed cases of the Wuhan coronavirus will be detected. And the more cases that are detected, the more these politicians are going say, "We can't reopen the cities and the states, because the number of cases keeps increasing." Get the picture?

They keep changing the criteria for reopening. First, it was hospital beds, right? Remember? Now hospitals are empty. Next, it was PPE equipment and ventilators, now we have so many ventilators that we're giving them away to other countries. And so now it's testing.

The truth is Newsom and Cuomo and Murphy and Northam are attempting to drag out this dark moment in American history as long as possible, and it's high time that the American people understand all of this.

...

What the mayor left out, by the way, yeah he said that 70-something percent, almost 80 percent of people dying in Los Angeles from COVID-19 are over the age of 65, but they also have underlying health conditions that are contributing to this. And this is an important factor but he's leaving that out. This is lying by omission to ten million people in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles.

I firmly believe, when you look at this through your prism of liberty, through your prism of the United States constitution, that this is the greatest attack on individual liberty in this republic since the Korematsu decision. And for folks who don't know their history and don't know what I'm talking about, the Korematsu decision, in World War II, FDR, the hero of the left, locked up Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, took away everything they had, put them in concentration camps. This is what the great FDR did. And the Supreme Court backed him, the Korematsu decision.

In the end, we know our history, Richard. We did compensate for this atrocity, this attack on the Constitution and the constitutional rights of Americans. But this — I don't know, I don't know if we'll ever be compensated.

Transcript, via Media Matters:

GRAHAM LEDGER (HOST): Why the Wuhan coronavirus death count numbers are simply not statistically valid. The number of death by COVID-19 in this country is utterly worthless.

...

Problem number one is a statistical one and it emanates from the National Center for Health Statistics, the Division Of Vital Statistics, which is a function of the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC. These would be egghead, government, beancounter scientists-types who live and thrive in the Washington, D.C. swamp.

Back on March 24, the National Center for Health Statistics issued a new ICD code introduced for the COVID-19 deaths. ICD stands for "International Classification of Diseases." In other words, this is the standard for doctors to use in classifying death by COVID-19. Doctors are to use this guidance as their blueprint for classifying whether a person died from the Wuhan coronavirus or not.

Alright, so what does it say? Well, this piece of genius says, under the question "should COVID-19 be reported on the death certificate only when a confirmed test is given?" The answer is stunning. It says that COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate when it is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. That's right. Assumed. In other words, the doctor does not know for sure. And that's where the contributed portion is relevant. Patient comes in, who may have chronic lung disease, but has come down with symptoms of the Wuhan coronavirus. Person dies. There's no autopsy. Just a death certificate filled out by the doctor who is following the guidelines as prescribed by the National Center for Health Statistics. So the doctor puts down "Cause of death: COVID-19" when it easily could —should — have been the pulmonary issue.

So why, why? Why the liberal guidance on labeling death by COVID-19? Answer: We're dealing with charter members of the Washington D.C. swamp who are attempting to justify the radical anti-liberty guidance emanating from the CDC.

Oh, but this warping of the Wuhan coronavirus death count gets even worse. Hospitals. Hospitals are reimbursed at a higher rate for COVID-19 diagnoses than, say, for example, the flu or for pneumonia. Did you know that? This is confirmed by Dr. Scott Jensen of Minnesota, who is also a state senator there. The American Medical Association is encouraging hospitals to over-diagnose patients with the Wuhan coronavirus, according to Jensen. What is more, they receive, these hospitals, triple the Medicare funding if the patient is then put on a ventilator. Remember, remember the push for ventilators in California that was so successful that the governor of California, in the once golden state, then gave away, he gave away hundreds of extra ventilators to other states? They are fudging the numbers, folks. Between the over-liberal death by corona guidance from the CDC and the financial incentive to label patients as suffering from COVID-19, these numerical values for the Wuhan coronavirus simply are not valid.

Noor Al-Sibai at MMFA: 

During the April 6 episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver took on the One America News Network and highlighted the network’s shilling for President Donald Trump and why the propaganda it spews is so dangerous.

Oliver noted that during recent press conferences, Trump has seemingly enjoyed calling on OAN, and he played several clips of the network’s chief White House correspondent Chanel Rion asking Trump softball, sometimes ridiculous, questions. In one clip, Rion seems to reference criticism against Trump calling the novel coronavirus the “Chinese virus” by asking the president if it’s racist to use the term “‘Chinese food’ because it is food that originates in China.”

“It’s moments like that that explain why Trump has such a love affair with OAN,” Oliver said.

Oliver also pinpointed the network’s other hosts also engage in propaganda and far-right rhetoric, noting that OAN’s Graham Ledger, host of The Daily Ledger, “called Black Lives Matter ‘a criminal organization,’ has called being transgender ‘a mental problem,’ and said of people coming to the U.S. from majority-Muslim countries, ‘If they won’t take a bite out of a pulled-pork sandwich, we probably won’t let them in the country.’”

“The network has actively given airtime to conspiracy theories,” Oliver said, noting that OAN once offered a $100,000 reward for information on the death of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and filmed a multipart special with Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine as he took on “investigations” there into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

John Oliver tackled why One America News Network’s pro-Trump propaganda that makes Fox “News” look like a centrist TV channel as dangerous and corrosive in his HBO show last night.

From the 04.05.2020 edition of HBO’s Last Week Tonight:

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