Trump backers eye purchase of conservative cable network (OAN)

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, President Donald Trump’s allies are trying to acquire the conservative-leaning privately owned One America News Network and to potentially take on Fox News Channel directly.

The Journal said that investment firm Hicks Equity Partners—which is owned by the family of Thomas Hicks Jr., co-chairman of the Republican National Committee and a close friend of Donald Trump Jr. is looking to acquire the company with the help of other wealthy GOP donors for roughly $250 million from San Diego based Herring Networks.

Even though Fox News dominates cable news and conservative cable news in particular, Hicks Equity Partners sees potential value in investing in OANN.

“Over the last 25 years, we have been active media investors. Any interest in OANN is from a purely business standpoint,” said Rick Newman, a partner at Hicks Equity Partners who is leading the deal with family patriarch and Trump donor Thomas Hicks.

One America News Network president Charles Herring said in an email to the Journal that the network has become “a reliable news source for a national audience,” adding that the company has seen interest from potential suitors from time to time. “With the 2020 political season in full swing, expressed interest is on the rise,” he wrote. “Yet our family didn’t build our operations to sell it.”

Telecom must not also control the news.

NEWS FLASH!
The wire services in general, and the AP in particular, essentially created national news. As such they define it, and they control it.
It’s hard for us to get our heads around the difference that the telegraph (demo’d by Morse in 1844) made. People were awed at the new ability to receive from far-flung places reports of events within a day of their occurrence. We take it for granted, and we take the wire services for granted.
But think about it:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
. . . and what is the AP “wire,” for example, but a continuous, unending, virtual meeting of the membership of the AP? And something similar could be said about any and all other wire services.
The wire service was invented by 1848 to exploit the value, and minimize the expense, of telegraph bandwidth when the telegraph was new and bandwidth was expensive. The Sherman AntiTrust Act dates only to 1890, and by then the AP was definitely “too big to fail.” Even in 1945, when the AP lost an antitrust case, nobody could seriously think about abolishing the AP.
But that was before the revolution in digital communications which empowers the Internet. Now FR alone almost certainly uses more bandwidth than the AP did in 1945. There is absolutely nothing preventing the wire services (and esp. the AP) from losing a lollapalooza of an antitrust action.
Except for fear of the very propaganda power which it abuses.
The other factor is the Warren Court’s unanimous 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision.
Sullivan limited the ability of government officials and judges to sue for libel. But absent the vote of Antonin Scalia, the Morrison v. Olson decision of the Rhenquist Court woulda been unanimous, too - but nobody now thinks that Morrison is good law. And guess what! Antonin Scalia called Sullivan bad law, too. He pointed out that prior to 1964 no court held that the First Amendment modified libel law. For the simple reason that the purpose of the entire Bill of Rights was to reassure the public that the Constitution did not reduce anyone’s rights, and it (including 1A) were crafted to achieve that purpose.

". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”
is just a fig leaf Justice Brennan put in his Sullivan decision to cover the fact that he (and the entire Warren Court) was making it up. 1A was crafted not to touch libel (or pornography) law, and the Ninth Amendment (The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people) exists to preserve them.
Blanket “freedom of the press” would have affected libel and pornography laws, but 1A refers to “the freedom . . . of the press. And the freedom of the press already existed and was limited by libel and pornography laws. Reducing those latter constraints on the press would have been controversial - and controversy (over the newly, and just barely, ratified Constitution) was precisely what the Federalists creating the Bill of Rights were trying to transcend.

The network launched in 2013 and boasts that they report straight news with no opinion—in a stab at cable TV news in general and doesn’t subscribe to Nielsen ratings so there is no reliable data available on viewership.
Trump has been critical of Fox News from time to time and even tweeted that he watches OANN, but is well aware that if he wants to reach a large conservative audience, Fox News is the only way to do that.
For the potential buyers, OANN represents an inexpensive way to build a conservative alternative to Fox News while expanding the conservative media universe.
The journalism cartel produced by the wire services (see my #34) conspires against the public (as Adam Smith would have predicted). It does so by propagandizing the public to the effect that journalists are objective. It thereby changes the meaning of “objective” from “neutral” to “whatever perspective which the journalism cartel projects.” This is the cause of herd journalism - deviate from the herd and you are “not a journalist, not objective.”
And make no doubt, journalism has an inherent perspective which is related to interesting the public - which is quite a different thing from “the public interest.” Journalism interests the public by reporting unexpected events, which is a category dominated by bad news.
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy! Robert Burns
Once commit to a search for bad news, and you, dear journalist, are systematically negative. That is your perspective. When you call that negativity “objective,” when you claim that “negativity is objectivity,” you are cynical.
It is therefore the case that altho you may, laudably, try to be objective - and if so, even unobjectionably claim that - to claim actual objectivity is to mark you as a cynic. And, therefore, no conservative.
The journalism cartel with its pseudo objectivity engages in sophistry. The classical Greek response to the Sophists’ claims of superior wisdom was the development of “philosophy.” Philosophy eschews argumentation from claims of authority (e.g., superior wisdom) and systematically claims only to love (and seek) wisdom. Under the pressure of the sophistry of the journalism cartel, talk radio hosts perforce cling to the “philosophy” model.

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