At the right-wing news channel One America News Network, “there’s still serious doubts about who’s actually president,” as OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp said in a March 28 report. OAN “has become a kind of Trump TV for the post-Trump age,” The New York Times reported Sunday, and some of its “coverage has not had the full support of the staff.” One OAN producer, Marty Golingan, said the network had lurched to the right since he joined in 2016.
The “majority” of his colleagues “did not believe the voter fraud claims being run on the air,” Golingan told the Times, and “a lot of people said, ‘This is insane, and maybe if [Dominion Voting Systems] sue us, we’ll stop putting stories like this out.'” He said OAN’s news director, Lindsay Oakley, reprimanded him for referring to “President Biden” in news copy.
Golingan was fired Monday. He had told the Times‘ Rachel Abrams he would wear being sacked as “a badge of honor.”
Of 18 current and former OAN staffers Abrams interviewed, 16 said their employer had broadcast reports they consider misleading, inaccurate, or untrue. But several also said they have bills to pay and few other job prospects. “We’re not Nazis,” one producer told Abrams. “Just, like, everyday people.”
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