An inside look at One America News, the insurgent TV network taking ‘pro-Trump’ to new heights
One America News is an obscure TV channel struggling to emerge from the cellar of the cable ratings, but it is nonetheless one of President Trump’s favorite media outlets. It’s not hard to see why: On One America newscasts, the Trump administration is a juggernaut of progress, a shining success with a daily drumbeat of achievements.
One America — a tiny father-and-sons operation that often delivers four times as many stories per hour as its competitors — promises “straight news, no opinion,” promoting itself as the antidote to the Big Three cable news networks’ focus on punditry and the one big story of the moment.
But since its inception in 2013, and especially since Trump began his march to the White House, One America’s owner, Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire who made his money printing circuit boards, has directed his channel to push Trump’s candidacy, scuttle stories about police shootings, encourage antiabortion stories, minimize coverage of Russian aggression, and steer away from the new president’s troubles, according to more than a dozen current and former producers, writers and anchors, as well as internal emails from Herring and his top news executives.
OAN, based in San Diego, made its first splash in the opening weeks of the Trump campaign, when the channel became the first to carry Trump’s campaign speeches live and in full — a decision followed quickly by the owner’s directive that other candidates’ rallies not be given the same treatment, according to internal emails.
Since then, OAN has become a reliably sympathetic voice of the administration’s goals and actions. Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has a deal to appear regularly on the channel. The network’s White House reporter, Trey Yingst, has become an administration favorite who was called on at the daily news briefings 27 times in Trump’s first 100 days in office. On Friday, OAN won a seat in the White House briefing room, albeit in the back row and shared with the BBC.
In a volatile TV news landscape where the longtime ratings leader, Fox News, is suffering through a period of internal turmoil, One America has tried to elbow itself into the big leagues,
publicly wooing former Fox star Bill O’Reilly to join OAN. Although O’Reilly didn’t take the bait and the channel is available in only about 30 million homes, a far cry from Fox News’s 90 million, One America is growing — in viewer numbers, in influence in Republican circles, and as a potential alternative for conservatives and libertarians who believe Fox’s commitment to a right-wing perspective is weakening.
“We’re a no-fluff, very fast-paced live news service meant to inform,” said Charles Herring, Robert’s son and president of Herring Broadcasting, which owns One America. “News anchors are not allowed to express opinions. They simply deliver the news and we leave it up to the viewers to decide. It’s not our family’s mission to determine the news.”
Nonetheless, Robert Herring has repeatedly shaped the news on OAN. During the campaign, for example, he banned stories about polls that showed anyone other than Trump in the lead, according to emails and interviews with OAN journalists.
Early one morning in March 2016, Herring emailed producers with a directive, two hours before former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was to denounce Trump as “very, very not smart”: “Do not carry the Romney speech live,” Herring wrote. “Romney has no standing. . . . He is a loser. We will let the people decide.”
Robert Herring did not respond to several requests for an interview. Charles Herring spoke to The Washington Post, but would not allow a reporter to visit OAN’s newsroom and would not make news executives available. “Senior staff personal opinions are irrelevant,” Herring said in an email to The Post. More than a dozen current and former OAN anchors, writers and producers spoke about their experiences at the channel, in many cases on condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
OAN’s journalists include conservatives, moderates and liberals, but employees across the political spectrum said they often chafed at the restrictions that came down from “Mr. H,” as they called Robert Herring.
“The owner of the company became the de facto news director,” said a former OAN producer who quit because the coverage of Trump had become “too slanted.” “He has a ton of influence over every aspect of the newscast. He has stories written on his whim.”
“We started out with the premise of news straight down the middle,” said Cassie Leuffen, an anchor at OAN from its birth through the 2016 election. “But the bias does reveal itself in the story selection. The owner really felt this was what was needed. He saw the popularity of Trump before almost anybody, and Trump became our bread and butter.”
Christopher Wood, one of OAN’s first news writers, recalled, “We’d have staff meetings on Wednesdays, and Mr. H. would say he wanted more stories from Breitbart, the Drudge Report and other conservative sites. It was his way or no way.”
In 2000, Robert Herring Sr., who is 76, sold the family’s business, Herco Technology, for $122 million. He retired and met a woman in Russia who became his third wife. An insomniac, Herring spent much of his nights watching TV. After a while, he decided to dive into the business himself.
In 2004, he launched Wealth TV, a cable channel now known as
AWE (A Wealth of Entertainment), featuring shows such as “Dream Cruises,” “Private Islands” and “Marijuana Miracle Cure.” Charles Herring called Wealth TV “a vicarious living channel,” and the bulk of its fare focuses on luxury travel. But Robert Herring also used his channel as something of a soapbox. In 2004, Wealth TV ran a two-hour special on the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who had spent half her life in a vegetative state. On the show, Herring offered $1 million to Schiavo’s husband if he would halt his effort to remove her from life support. (Schiavo died in 2005 after her feeding tube was removed.)
Along with the travel shows, Wealth TV aired a few short newscasts. “My father is a news junkie, and we saw that the 30-minute newscasts we had on Wealth TV were actually generating an audience,” Charles said. “We looked at MSNBC and Fox and I kept thinking that Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly had the same format — one person spending an hour beating three or four subjects to death. CNN was moving in the same direction, away from hard news. There was a lane for us to hit the news down the center and lean right.”
In 2013, the family created its second channel, One America News. Robert Herring’s idea was to provide something that had gone missing from the cable news landscape — a basic headline service covering national and international news. Herring, long an active donor to political campaigns, had no journalism experience.
The channel he created is a rapid-fire cavalcade of headlines. Most stories run well under a minute. Almost all of the reports are read by the anchors over video footage provided by the Reuters, Associated Press and Euronews services, as well as by RT, the Kremlin-funded news outlet that a U.S. intelligence report calls “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine.”
OAN has only four correspondents of its own, based mainly in Washington. Earlier this month, in 16 consecutive stories, those reporters interviewed only conservative lawmakers and experts — a sharp contrast from Fox and MSNBC, which, despite their overt political leanings, routinely include the other side in their reports.
OAN breaks its cycle of half-hour newscasts only for two hours of evening opinion shows — The Daily Ledger with Graham Ledger and Tipping Point with Liz Wheeler — both of which are guns-blazing nightly tributes to Trump. Ledger is a tough guy who takes no prisoners. Talking about people coming into the country from majority-Muslim countries, he says, “If they won’t take a bite out of a pulled pork sandwich, we probably won’t let them in the country.” Wheeler leans more on clever snark and verbal eyerolls: “How many innocent people have Islamophobes killed this week? Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Charles Herring said the shows are the only part of OAN that “leans right,” a direction he said is based not on his family’s political views, but on “survey data.”
