A great deal of consternation followed the decision earlier this year by DirecTV to drop One America News Network (OAN), the fringe, far-right cable news network. DirecTV officially dropped the channel in April, a couple of months after first announcing it, and cited the expiration of their contract. 

Following the decision, one OAN anchor asked his audience to dig up dirt on the chairman of AT&T, the majority shareholder of DirecTV (the satellite broadcaster was spun off from AT&T, which formerly owned it in its entirety.) Later, OAN sued DirecTV, a group of Republican state attorneys general sent a threatening letter, and former President Donald Trump got involved as well. 

Trump later issued a statement ripping “Time Warner” for dropping OAN, which was erroneous; Time Warner Cable ceased to exist many years ago, the company now known as Warner Bros. Discovery does not own cable systems, and Trump had apparently confused one former subsidiary of AT&T with another. 

Now, OAN has lost another major carrier.

The Daily Beast reported Thursday that Verizon Fios announced that it will drop the channel.

“Our negotiation with OAN has been a typical, business as usual carriage negotiation like those that routinely happen between content distributors and content providers. These negotiations were focused on economics, as they always are, but OAN failed to agree to fair terms,” a Fios spokesperson told The Daily Beast.

“Since we were unable to reach an agreement, effective July 31, 2022, we will no longer have the rights to provide our customers with this programming, and it will be removed from the Fios TV lineup.”

Fios was the last major TV provider that offered One America News and will continue to offer it for only about ten more days.

“Our company has long advocated for providing customers with the ability to choose what content they want to watch, and our Fios TV platform offers a wide and diverse choice of programming options, including a la carte options, that strive to meet our millions of customers' various content needs and preferences,” Verizon said in its statement. 

Per Media Matters, OAN has been accusing Verizon of “censorship,” over the possibility of the network being dropped from Fios.

“In the case of Verizon threatening to drop OAN in particular, the timing of that, at least from our end, seems to be right before the midterms, right when the American public tend to have recovered from the political fatigue of the presidential election, and then they start tuning in to become informed about who they will vote for in the midterms,” Newsmax correspondent Chanel Rion said on the air earlier this month, the site reported.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.