Before One America News Network host Dan Ball wrapped up an interview with guest Jim Jordan last week, he asked the Republican congressman from Ohio for a favor.

“Please lobby AT&T and DirecTV for us,” said Ball, whose nightly “Real America” ​​show airs nightly on the right-wing cable channel. “OAN would like to continue broadcasting on this platform and we know full well that everything is political behind the scenes as to why they are doing this to us.”

Earlier in the week, Ball asked viewers to send him “dirt” about William Kannard, chairman of DirecTV’s parent company AT&T, including any evidence of marital infidelity. OAN’s 80-year-old founder, tech entrepreneur Robert Herring, also went on camera asking viewers to ask other cable and satellite providers in their area to add the channel to their Waiting lines.

The desperate pleas for help — which would be considered unseemly on a traditional cable news channel — follow DirecTV’s January 15 announcement that it will drop the San Diego-based OAN from its service in April. . DirecTV, which AT&T created last summer, accounts for nearly half of the 35 million homes that can receive OAN on cable or satellite TV. The channel is not widely distributed enough to be measured by Nielsen.

The loss of DirecTV will deprive the channel of its main source of revenue and cast doubt on the future of the operation, where President Biden’s administration is branded as a ‘regime’ and concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic are called hysteria. OAN correspondents encouraged efforts to verify the vote tally in the 2020 elections.

OAN isn’t the only conservative outlet to lose distribution. Newsmax, the Boca Raton, Fla.-based channel that is the television home of former President Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, was pulled from four cable systems in January after failing to wrap up new distribution agreements with these companies.

Both channels have gained notoriety in recent years by seeking out conservative viewers who believe that Fox News, the dominant leader in cable ratings, hasn’t shown enough unwavering loyalty to Trump. Both think it’s now open season on conservative outlets.

“We have 11 liberal news and information channels in a typical cable package, with Fox News Channel and Newsmax as the only alternatives,” Newsmax chief executive Chris Ruddy said in a statement to The Times. “All Americans are harmed when a voice, liberal or conservative, is shut down. We believe that society as a whole benefits from more discussion and political opinions being represented, not less.

Progressive groups, which have lobbied the companies to drop OAN, welcomed DirecTV’s decision.

“The network is a known perpetrator of misinformation and extremism, fueling real-world violence and putting the health and safety of so many at risk,” said Yosef Getachew, director of the Common Cause Media & Democracy program.

A 2017 Washington Post article on OAN based on internal company emails, noted how Herring steered his channel to avoid any negative stories about Trump, who regularly promoted the outlet on his Twitter feed.

As recently as March 2021, an OAN correspondent, Pearson Sharp, said in a report: “There are still serious doubts about who really is president. In another, he suggested that COVID-19 vaccines cause mass deaths.

OAN, Newsmax and Fox News are all being sued for defamation by voting technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion. Both companies say their reputations have been tarnished by false claims made by presenters and guests that echoed Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

Lawsuits could create significant liabilities and a whole lot of bad publicity for the networks, complicating their relationships with distributors. The networks said they were within their 1st Amendment rights to report allegations of voter fraud made by well-known public figures, including Trump advisers and members of Congress.
The pay-TV providers who dropped OAN and Newsmax argue that it was not politics that drove their decisions, but the shattered economics of their business.

Cable and satellite companies are dealing with the loss of subscribers as the emergence of streaming services, such as Netflix, disrupts television viewing habits. The number of pay-TV households fell nearly 9% in the first nine months of 2021, according to research firm MoffettNathanson. DirecTV also suffered significant subscriber losses.

The cost of a cable plan is a major factor in consumers’ decisions to cut the cord, meaning service providers are under pressure not to raise rates. Cable bills go up when the cost of delivering programming is passed on to consumers.

DirecTV has not commented on OAN beyond its initial statement saying the decision to drop it came “after routine internal review.” The company’s chief executive, Bill Morrow, provided an explanation in a memo to employees obtained by The Times.

Morrow said channel distribution decisions are based on “industry trends such as secular decline, programming price increases, competitive bids with lower prices, offers from our competitors and consumers’ desire for tighter packages”.

Breezeline, the Quincy, Mass.-based cable company formerly known as Atlantic Alliance, took a similar stance in its commentary on its decision to part ways with Newsmax.

“While we worked in good faith to negotiate a fair deal, Newsmax insisted on terms and conditions that we could not agree to,” Breezeline spokesman Andrew Walton said. “The decision was in no way related to network content.”

Walton added that Newsmax’s demands for higher fees “would have resulted in increased TV fees for all Breezeline customers – for a free online channel for other viewers”.

Newsmax can be streamed online without a pay-TV subscription, a selling point the company has touted to Fox News fans who are reluctant to ditch cable. (Fox Nation, the streaming service operated by Fox News, shows the cable channel’s programming only on tape delay and does not have a live news program.)

While the loss of carriage on Breezeline and other smaller carriers won’t significantly reduce the 54 million homes that stream Newsmax, other cable companies may cite the service’s free stream as a reason to drop it from their channel listings. in the future.

“It could be a canary in the coal mine,” said a veteran cablecasting executive who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Newsmax noted that it has taken over distribution on 170 pay-TV systems since November 2020. While Newsmax has publicly expressed support for OAN, its executives privately distance themselves from their most extreme competitor.

Newsmax is still a major comfort zone for Trump supporters — its biggest audiences come from live coverage of the former president’s rallies, which Fox News no longer airs. But Newsmax declared Biden the winner of the 2020 election — which OAN resisted — and has been a strong supporter of COVID-19 vaccines.

As for OAN, the loss of revenue through DirecTV – Herring told his viewers the company gets 10 cents a month per subscriber – would mean it had to drastically change its business model to survive. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

OAN could be offered as a direct-to-consumer subscription service or as a free video-on-demand channel supported by advertisers. Herring also has a multi-channel subscription streaming service called KlowdTV which includes OAN.

“We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do yet,” Herring told viewers. “But don’t worry, we have plenty of options.”

Times editor Meg James contributed to this report.