“We’re a no-fluff, very fast-paced live news service meant to inform,” said Charles Herring, Robert’s son and president of Herring Broadcasting, which owns One America. “News anchors are not allowed to express opinions. They simply deliver the news and we leave it up to the viewers to decide. It’s not our family’s mission to determine the news.”
Nonetheless, Robert Herring has repeatedly shaped the news on OAN. During the campaign, for example, he banned stories about polls that showed anyone other than Trump in the lead, according to emails and interviews with OAN journalists.
.. Early one morning in March 2016, Herring emailed producers with a directive, two hours before former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney was to denounce Trump as “very, very not smart”: “Do not carry the Romney speech live,” Herring wrote. “Romney has no standing. . . . He is a loser. We will let the people decide.”
.. “The owner of the company became the de facto news director,” said a former OAN producer who quit because the coverage of Trump had become “too slanted.” “He has a ton of influence over every aspect of the newscast. He has stories written on his whim.”
.. “We started out with the premise of news straight down the middle,” said Cassie Leuffen, an anchor at OAN from its birth through the 2016 election. “But the bias does reveal itself in the story selection. The owner really felt this was what was needed. He saw the popularity of Trump before almost anybody, and Trump became our bread and butter.”
.. “We looked at MSNBC and Fox and I kept thinking that Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly had the same format — one person spending an hour beating three or four subjects to death. CNN was moving in the same direction, away from hard news. There was a lane for us to hit the news down the center and lean right.”
.. Robert Herring’s idea was to provide something that had gone missing from the cable news landscape — a basic headline service covering national and international news.
.. The channel he created is a rapid-fire cavalcade of headlines. Most stories run well under a minute. Almost all of the reports are read by the anchors over video footage provided by the Reuters, Associated Press and Euronews services, as well as by RT, the Kremlin-funded news outlet that a U.S. intelligence report calls “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine.”
OAN has only four correspondents of its own, based mainly in Washington. Earlier this month, in 16 consecutive stories, those reporters interviewed only conservative lawmakers and experts — a sharp contrast from Fox and MSNBC, which, despite their overt political leanings, routinely include the other side in their reports.
.. OAN breaks its cycle of half-hour newscasts only for two hours of evening opinion shows — The Daily Ledger with Graham Ledger and Tipping Point with Liz Wheeler — both of which are guns-blazing nightly tributes to Trump. Ledger is a tough guy who takes no prisoners. Talking about people coming into the country from majority-Muslim countries, he says, “If they won’t take a bite out of a pulled pork sandwich, we probably won’t let them in the country.” Wheeler leans more on clever snark and verbal eyerolls: “How many innocent people have Islamophobes killed this week? Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
.. Charles Herring said the shows are the only part of OAN that “leans right,” a direction he said is based not on his family’s political views, but on “survey data.”
.. OAN was an exciting, attractive place for budding journalists right out of college. Here, they could skip the traditional first step of toiling in the hinterlands and move directly into work on big national stories.
.. In the channel’s first couple of years, OAN writers, producers and anchors said they were mostly left alone to determine the content of the newscasts. After Trump announced his candidacy, things changed.
“We should ALWAYS take the trump speeches live in their entirety,” executive producer Lindsay Oakley wrote to her staff early in the campaign. “I don’t want producers’ personal feelings getting in the way of the news content we provide. Trump is being treated unfairly by the mainstream media and we need to provide the other side. . . . Not to mention we have loyal viewers that tune in specifically to see the Trump speeches live because no one else carries them. We also see some of our highest ratings during the Trump speeches.”
.. OAN employees recounted receiving reprimands signed by Robert Herring or being called into his office to be dressed down for “insubordination” when they ran stories he disapproved of.
“Please please please avoid ferguson stories!!!” Oakley wrote after OAN aired a report on Ferguson, Mo.’s battle with the Justice Department over reforms to the city’s police and court systems following an officer’s shooting of an unarmed black man. A story that aired three times on the channel “made police look bad and Mr. H. has told all of us not to do that. Please just avoid ferguson stories all together.”
.. Herring ordered that OAN minimize coverage of Pope Francis’s U.S. visit in 2015 because the pope had urged comprehensive action against climate change.
.. Producers said Herring repeatedly urged against running stories critical of Russia. (Herring’s online streaming company, KlowdTV, features a package offering just Herring’s own channels and RT. Another package adds Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and Newsmax.)
.. OAN airs few commercials; the Herrings are skeptical of advertising as a prime revenue source, relying instead on subscriber fees that cable systems pay content providers for their programming.
.. “Obviously, they’re not in it for the money, because they’re bleeding money,” said Armstrong Williams, the conservative commentator and TV station owner, who gave the Herrings advice as they were launching OAN. “They’re believers; they care about balancing the media. I saw them as good guys, a little green, without a full idea of what this was going to cost. It’s amazing they’re still up and running.”
Wood, one of the channel’s first writers, said OAN is Robert Herring’s “way to hobnob with political figures and maybe have some political influence. This is one man’s hobby.”
The Trump Cult?
Is the movement that elected Donald Trump President of the United States a cult?
Big Lies that turn perceptual frames or paradigms on their heads” and pull “false lesser-associated non-‘facts’ . . . in train behind the flipped central premise . . . is the very economical technique used by cults both religious and political.”
.. Boot accurately observed that:
Trump’s most ardent supporters are . . . remolding their own views to keep pace with their leader. . . . This shows the extent to which Trump’s rise was not based on any particular positions or views. It was and remains a cult of personality. Trump’s followers worship him—and he worships himself, too. They are bound by a conviction, rooted in basically nothing but quasi-religious faith, that he is a singularly tough and savvy dealmaker who will protect American interests in a way that no previous president has done.
.. the idea of a cult of personality, if not the actual phrase, applies to a great many pre-modern political leaders as well, perhaps most of them. The key point of Weber’s distinction was to indicate that in more institutionalized modern political settings some combination of law, custom, and more or less egalitarian norms tends to diminish or at least limit the personalization of political orders.
When cults of personality happen anyway in post-patrimonial political cultures it indicates some invasion of culturally sacred space by what is supposed to be cordoned off from it in a secular age.
Why does this happen? Lilla and others have suggested that political cults tend to fill religious vacuums; that is, they tend to arise when people lose faith in the efficacy of the religious status quo to manage their problems. In other words, in times of confusion and fear, people will vouchsafe unto symbols of the nation, the state, the race, the leader, and so on what they used to reserve for God and related religious symbols.
.. the burgeoning of political religion usually indicates an urge to regress from a contemporary mean—to go back to a purer, simpler, nobler, or somehow better life. In the 20th century the urge to regression invariably involved a demeaning of modernity, which first established the secular divide. Both fascist and communist varieties of political religion sought to: efface individual agency and smother it in the superior collective, hence the disdain for the cacophonous messiness of democracy
.. two phrases from Virgil: Novus Ordo Seclorum and Annuit Coeptis. For the Founders to have called the United States a “new order of the ages” and to have claimed that “He has approved our undertakings” calls to mind the language of Roman (Republic-era) prophecy and suggests that, like the coming of Christ, the birth of the United States will in due course redeem mankind. The God referred to is only tacitly and hence vaguely the God of the Bible, but He is certainly the God of America.
- .. First, there is sharp differentiation between the in-group of believers or adepts and outsiders, who are demonized as enemies. So loyalty is a first-order virtue, and ritualized loyalty oaths often exist in one form or another.
- Second, there is a charismatic leader.
- .. Second, there is a strong repugnance for theologies or ideologies that are different, and a special absolute rejection of theologies or ideologies that are close but not identical. Deviations from the belief system are rarely accepted as genuine or honest doubt, but are treated either as heresy or alien-group infiltration.
- Third, the belief system is utopian.
- Fourth, in-group members aver that the group’s beliefs are obvious or natural, and that anyone who rejects them is “blind” or somehow diseased. Conspiracy theories that tend to unify all opposition to the group are common.
- Fifth, members proselytize upon opportunity.
- Sixth, members believe that any means is justified by the end—including deception, outright lying, theft, physical intimidation, and often violence.
- And seventh, in-group members believe in the inevitable triumph of the belief system; they are incurable optimists.
.. but Trump is in most respects several country miles to the left of Tea Party orthodoxy (and of today’s so-called Freedom Caucus).
.. Karl Kraus summed up the process best: “The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he is.” I do not think Trump is manipulating a movement; he is as encyclopedically ignorant as he seems.
.. most self-avowed Christian religious fervor one sees today in the United States, especially of the Protestant sort, is not born of traditional, innocent faith. Much of what professed fervor there is, it seems to me, reflects a deep desire for community and identity in an alienating hyper-commercial culture that is best at manufacturing material fetishism and emotional insecurity. A good deal of it, in reaction, is intellectualized (neo-fundamentalist) religion that often seems to lack the power of the real thing in a pinch.4 And that small but influential shard of it known as the evangelical movement is itself already highly politicized, so can be seen as an element breaking down the divide of secular arrangements moving from the religious side toward the political. This seems the most persuasive way to explain evangelical support for Trump—as a form of political transactualism—a man who in no way resembles the model of a pious Christian.
.. I don’t know, and at this early point no one can know, not least because this President is neither a predictable nor stable character.
.. We do not know how this President will react to political crises born of seemingly baked-in scandals
.. But whatever happens, we would be well advised to watch not just the man but also the movement. To the extent it is more cult-like than its recent predecessors, the “excitement” may be just ahead of us as the movement circles the wagons.
Jared Kushner under FBI scrutiny in Russia probe
Don’t underestimate Trump
Trump not only showed up for the St. Louis debate that Sunday, he stood on the stage and told Clinton that if it were up to him she’d “be in jail.” Ten days later, Trump insisted at the Las Vegas debate that allegations made against him by nine women of groping and other unwelcome physical contact were so baseless that he “didn’t even apologize to [his] wife” for his actions.
.. It is dangerous to underestimate Trump’s survival skills.
.. how tenaciously Trump pursued power, along with five key assets he has to maintain his grip on it
- .. Trump is an incredibly skilled politician.
- Second, there is the power of the presidency
- Well-regarded people — such as national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein — have shown a willingness to sacrifice their own credibility to protect Trump
- a retinue of prominent law firms appear ready to provide legal and public relations cover in defense
- the desire of many observers to try to normalize Trump and get “back to business.”
- an agenda of repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes.
- It might take shockingly little .. for pundits to conclude that he is “back on track.”
- intensity of his most devout supporters
- he was probably right when he said that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody”
- this group is 25 percent to 40 percent of the electorate
- they make up a majority of Republican primary voters in most Republican-held districts
- die-hard supporters are more devoted to Trump than they are to the rule of law.
- an increasing number of Americans generally, and Trump supporters specifically, have “lost faith in democracy.”
- he may even be at his most dangerous in “wounded animal” mode.