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(LifeSiteNews) — Democrats are “working to shut down news organizations all over the country,” including One America News Network (OANN), Tucker Carlson warned recently.
OANN is the latest target of the Democrats, according to Carlson, who recently interviewed Dan Ball, a journalist with the station, on “The Tucker Carlson Encounter.”
House Democrats pressured cable companies to drop Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews. Cable giant AT&T later did drop OANN, and liberal activists celebrated, LifeSiteNews reported.
OANN broke the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which led to the network being smeared as “purveyors of disinformation, Russian propagandists.”
The network also covered the harms of the jabs and how face masks do not prevent the spread of COVID. It also covered “irregularities” in the 2020 election.
READ: Canadian father files $35 million lawsuit against Pfizer over son’s jab-related death
This coverage led to Big Tech censorship and then political pressure.
Ball said:
YouTube demonetized us. I mean, every time we put a story about Covid masks, distancing, the laptop, boom, taken down, 30-day suspension, 60 days, or just try to kill the whole account.
And then all of a sudden, letters came out. I think about [2021] or [2022] and somebody can correct me if I’m wrong on the date… There was a letter from four Democrat senators and two California Congress folks, Democrats, who sent letters to not only all of the satellite and cable carriers, but also to advertisers. And they used that little thing from NewsGuard, which I heard you talk about NewsGuard in that ESG rating and pyramid system.
Reps. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA), members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent the letters in 2021.
“Our country’s public discourse is plagued by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies,” the letters stated.
NewsGuard is a liberal organization that ostensibly acts as a fact checker. The app, included in Microsoft browsers, labels outlets such as LifeSiteNews, The Blaze, and Breitbart with a “warning” allegedly for lacking the truth.
— Matt Lamb (@MattLamb22) May 6, 2024
The letter “scared away advertisers” and led to OANN being “kicked off multiple carriers.”
“Frontier, Verizon, DirecTV. Everything, because they sent these letters,” Ball said. The carriers dropped the company in 2022.
Carlson shortly after called the pressure campaign “so illegal and obviously illegal. It’s as illegal as anything you could do in America.”
“For members of Congress to shut down a news organization because they don’t like what it says,” Carlson said. “That is not allowed in the United States. That’s like any other crime, including murder or rape. It’s not allowed. And they’re doing it anyway.”
READ: Mark Zuckerberg reveals FBI prompted Facebook to suppress Hunter Biden laptop story
Ball later went on to call the cancellation efforts “un-American.”
Carlson shared why he believes OANN is being targeted.
“The people in charge, don’t want to be criticized, of course,” Carlson said. “No. Right. But in this country, they’re not allowed to do anything about it, but suddenly they are. Exactly.”
Ball said he is “110%” sure political pressure led to carriers dropping OANN, citing the company’s growth and how it was competing with established competitors.
He said:
We were actually scoring close to some of the Fox Business shows. We were beating Newsmax. We were climbing, my show personally, was climbing big time. And then all of a sudden, we’re killed because they saw us growing. They saw the audience tuning in to want to hear some truth because… can you trust MSNBC and CNN? You used to work there, and to a degree, some of the folks on Fox, a lot of the mainstream media, I think Americans are wising up, you can’t trust anymore.
“Because everybody’s figuring out you have to spew a narrative depending on which network you work for.”
While the company has remained on small cable affiliates, it has been taken off “all the big ones,” Ball said.
The company has now begun building up a streaming app, which took a “ton of money.”
Company founder won’t stop fighting for truth
Ball said OANN founder Robert Herring plans to continue to fight for the company, putting his own money in to keep it going.
“‘We’re not backing down. We have a right to broadcast, and they cannot shut us up,'” he said, commenting on how Herring views the situation.
There is a double standard at play, Ball stated. The major networks who accuse OANN of “misinformation” have regularly pushed stories, for example, about President Donald Trump, that were not true, he said.
“I mean, if somebody is a purveyor of misinformation, Tucker, why aren’t those other networks getting letters sent about” the hoax that Trump colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election, for example, Ball said.
“If we said something y’all said was misinformation, then I can point to, as you just said, probably ten or a dozen major stories that CNN, MSNBC, and others have lied or falsely reported about over the last, well, since 2015-16, since Trump came on the scene, are they kicked off carriers? Are they being sued?” he asked rhetorically.
The falsehoods about the safety and efficacy of the COVID jabs would qualify as “misinformation,” as well, Ball said.
The push for people to get jabbed to avoid, in President Biden’s words, a “winter of severe illness and death,” led to harms, including death, Ball suggested.
Remember, all those people and the celebrities coming together rallied around Joe [Biden] saying, “you must take it. And the people that don’t are going to kill people.” We just told people, “it’s your body. No one can force you to take it. And by the way, here’s the [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] VAERS reporting website. Have you looked at VAERS? Because there’s millions of side effects and thousands of deaths.” Those were facts. Yet we would get fact checked. We would get shadow banned for saying factual stuff.
The establishment journalist groups have not been supportive of OANN, Ball said, when asked by Carlson.
For example, the White House Correspondents’ Association opposed OANN’s Chanel Rion even being able to sit in press briefings during the Trump administration. It removed her from the briefings in April 2020, citing her breaking of “social distancing” rules.
Few “stood up” for OANN, Ball said, citing Gateway Pundit and Breitbart.
— Matt Lamb (@MattLamb22) May 6, 2024
“And no professional organization” defended OANN, Carlson asked, in reference to journalism and free speech groups.
“No,” Ball said.
Ball is optimistic for the future
Ball, a journalist for decades, said he has faith things will get better and also pointed out the changing nature of the news business.
He said:
The [Gen] Z-ers and the millennials are all online anyway. Nobody’s watching traditional media. They’re streaming everything. They’re getting their news on X… Instagram or TikTok. So yeah, this old school set, in a corporate setting, is done. What you’re doing is where everything’s going.
The interview wrapped up with Ball saying OANN is “going to win.”
“I think we’re going to survive. I think that we’re on the right side of history,” he said.
“We’re putting it in God’s hands… I think we’ll get through it. And I think we’ll only grow while the old dinosaurs die.”
Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators urging them to stop Trudeau’s ‘Online Harms Act’