Media

Far-Right One America News Is in Existential Crisis Amid Mass Exodus

CONFIDER

In this week’s edition of Confider, we reveal how OAN has been bleeding talent since it was announced that DirecTV would drop the far-right channel from the airwaves.

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Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty

This reporting appears as one of several scoops featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the media newsletter that pulls back the curtain to reveal what’s really going on inside the world’s most powerful navel-gazing industry. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.

AT&T-backed satellite provider DirecTV finally made it official last Tuesday, dropping far-right One America News from its lineup, leaving the conspiratorial channel in a full-blown existential crisis. The inevitability of OAN’s calamity also caused an exodus from the Trumpy network in recent weeks, Confider has confirmed.

Even though OAN owners Robert and Charles Herring hoped to force AT&T to keep them, and at one point begged other providers for a rescue, several key staffers saw the writing on the wall and bailed.

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Christina Bobb, the weekend host who moonlighted as former President Donald Trump’s insurrectionist attorney, ditched the network last month to work for Trump’s PAC. Taking over for Bobb as Weekly Briefing host is longtime OAN conspiracist Chanel Rion, who also co-founded an election-denying nonprofit with Bobb.

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Former Trump advisory board member Natalie Harp, who debuted last year in primetime with The Real Story, quietly left in mid-March to also go work for Trump. Additionally, correspondent and producer Jezzamine Wolk exited early last month to anchor a morning show for a local Louisiana news station.

Two people with knowledge of the situation further told Confider that White House correspondent Camryn Kinsey and producer Justin Adam Brown also recently jumped ship. Brown was the executive producer of Dan Ball’s nightly Real America show but is now at Newsmax—which has a history of poaching OAN talent. (Kinsey did not respond to Confider when asked about where she landed. Brown was not immediately available for comment.)

A rep for OAN did not respond to a request for comment.

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