One America News Network’s (OANN) host Dan Ball claimed Wednesday to Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson that Democrats allegedly attempted to shut down the network following the 2020 election.
Ball appeared on Carlson’s show on Twitter to discuss his claims that Democrats allegedly were involved in attempts to shut down the network sometime during the years 2021 and 2022. Carlson began by asking the OANN host how the issue started, to which Ball described their reporting on the infamous Hunter Biden laptop, which was first reported on by the New York Post. (RELATED: ‘Can’t Deal With The Lying’: Tucker Joins Joe Rogan To Talk Spiritual Beings, Cults, and Politics)
“So that’s when it really started, okay? They looked at us and went ‘Oh, my God, these guys are going to interfere with the election’ because we’re spitting truth to power,” Ball stated. “We’re telling you this laptop is real. The big guy is Joe Biden. He’s taking 10% he’s used his family and his influence to make millions to enrich himself. Well, they didn’t like that very much.”
“And then, of course, COVID,” Ball continued. “We’re in the middle of COVID. We busted through the narrative of the masks aren’t working. When Joe took over and he told everybody to get the vaccine, he was talking about that ‘winter of death’ and everything. We were talking about the irregularities rather you’d see with the vaccine when it comes to side effects and deaths. They didn’t like that.”
“So it was kind of cascading downward from the Hunter Biden laptop story to COVID coverage, and then we had the 2020 election, okay? And we had people on, of course, discussing irregularities in the election. They didn’t like any of that. So it started several ways. YouTube demonetized us — I mean every time we’d put a story about COVID, masks, distancing, the laptop, boom, take it down 30-day suspension, 60 days, or just try to kill the whole account. Then all of a sudden, letters came out. I think about 21′ or 22′,” Ball stated.
Ep. 100 Democrats in Congress are working to shut down a TV network that criticized them. That’s illegal but it’s happening. pic.twitter.com/QgEC8TllgJ
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 1, 2024
Ball alleged a letter was written by Democrats in both the Senate and Congress, allegedly advising carriers to drop Fox News, Newsmax and OANN over their coverage. Following the 2020 election, a report from Politico showed two House Democrats and members of the Energy and Commerce Committee vocalized their concern to lawmakers about networks spreading “misinformation” regarding the election following the Jan. 6 event.
Letters from Democratic California Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney were sent to AT&T, Verizon, Roku, Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Charter, DISH, Cox, Altice, Hulu and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, asking what “moral or ethical principles” are applied when “deciding which channels to carry or when to take adverse actions against a channel,” and asking if they would be continuing their partnership with Fox News, Newsmax and OANN, according to Politico.
“There was a letter from four Democrat senators and two California Congress folks, Democrats, who sent letters to not only all of the satellite and cable carriers but also to advertisers,” Ball continued.
“They told them to get rid of — and your old network was named — Fox, NewsMax and OAN. Now who’s the smallest on that totem pole? We are. So they came after us. They scared away advertisers, they got us kicked off multiple carriers — Frontier, Verizon, DirectTV, everything because the Democrats sent these letters.”
“What do you mean? So sitting members of Congress tried to get a news channel kicked off the air and bankrupted but isn’t that, I mean, call me naive. In the country I grew up in that was just absolutely not allowed. You weren’t allowed to do that,” Carlson responded.
“We’re not state-run TV, right? We’re not supposed to be. I mean, when I got into —” Ball stated.
“Well it’s against the law to do that,” Carlson jumped in.
“Well, but does this regime care? Look what the Biden regime has been doing to this country. Look at the border,” Ball stated.
YouTube suspended the network from its platform in 2020, citing that the outlet had shared COVID-19 misinformation which went against the social media platform’s policies, according to CBS News. Due to the strike against OANN, the network was forced to reapply to the YouTube Partner Program to make money off of their videos again, the outlet reported.
OANN was also eventually dropped from carriers in 2022 including major ones such as Verizon and AT&T, costing the network millions of viewers as their reach was significantly downsized, according to The New York Times.
Voting machine company Smartmatic sued OANN for defamation over the network’s claims of election interference, which was settled in April, according to NBC News. While the details of the settlement were not disclosed to the public, both OANN parent company Herring Networks and Smartmatic agreed to pay their own attorney fees and expenses, the outlet reported.