- The New York Times reports that about a dozen staff members recently left One America News.
- According to the report, some One America News employees are skeptical about reporting on their own network.
- The network leans heavily in favor of former President Donald Trump and false allegations.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Employees of the cable network One America News do not believe all the claims broadcast on it, according to a report by The New York Times.
According to the Sunday report, about a dozen staff members have left the network in recent months after the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead. The network has been broadcasting, repeating and speculating for months about the former president’s false allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
There is no evidence to suggest that material fraud affected the election. President Joe Biden won the election by beating Trump in key battlefields.
“A lot of people have expressed concern,” Allysia Britton, a news producer who recently left the network, told The New York Times. “And the thing is, when people talk about anything, you’ll get in trouble.”
Charles Herring, president of OAN, confirmed to The Times that about 12 staff members had recently left the network, but said their staff members were at a low level.
Marty Golingan, an OAN producer since 2016, said the “majority” of his colleagues at the network do not believe the allegations of voter fraud operating on the network. After the uprising, he said he feared his job at the network would help lead to the January 6 attack on the Capitol when he saw someone there had a flag with the network’s logo.
“I was like, OK, that’s not good,” Golingan said. “This is what happens when people listen to us.”
As USA Today reported in January, some media analysts linked rhetoric involving conservative networks, including Fox News, OAN and Newsmax, with the January 6 actions in Washington.
At a rally on December 5, 2020, about a month before the riot in the Capitol, Trump unveiled a report by OAN on the alleged hundreds of thousands of votes in the state of Georgia won by Biden. As USA Today reports, there is no evidence for such a claim.
The network doubled last year with unfounded conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems, even after the company sent a letter threatening to sue it for defamation. But as Insider’s Jacob Shamsian reported earlier, in January, the network quietly removed articles about conspiracy theories from its site’s election, including articles about Dominion, Smartmatic and pro-Trump advocates Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Lin Wood.
Herring defends the network’s reporting to The New York Times.
“A review process with multiple investigations has been put in place to ensure that news reports meet the company’s journalistic standards,” Herring said. “And yes, we did have a fair share of the mistakes, but we do our best to keep them to a minimum and learn from our mistakes.”
Two former employees who were also interviewed by the Times said they believe the network’s coverage is unbiased. A total of 16 current and former employees told The New York Times they believe the network passed on misleading or outright false information.