News

Employees of the cable network One America News do not believe all of the claims that are aired on it, according to a report by The New York Times.

According to the Sunday report, about a dozen staffers have left the network in recent months following the January 6 riot at the US Capitol that left five people dead. The network for months aired, repeated, and speculated on the former president’s false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election.

There is no evidence to suggest any substantial fraud influenced the election. President Joe Biden won the election by beating Trump in key battleground states.

“Many people have raised concerns,” Allysia Britton, a news producer who recently left the network told The New York Times. “And the thing is, when people speak up about anything, you will get in trouble.”

Charles Herring, the president of OAN, confirmed to The Times that about 12 staffers had recently departed the network, but said they were “low-level” staffers.

Marty Golingan, an OAN producer since 2016, said the “majority” of his colleagues at the network did not believe the claims of voter fraud that were being run on the network. After the insurrection, he said he feared that his work at the network helped lead to the January 6 attack on the Capitol when he saw someone there had a flag with the network’s logo.

“I was like, OK, that’s not good,” Golingan said. “That’s what happens when people listen to us.”

As USA Today reported in January, some media analysts have connected rhetoric espoused on conservative networks, including Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax to the actions that took place in Washington on January 6.

At a December 5, 2020, rally about a month before the Capitol riot, Trump showed rallygoers a report from OAN that alleged hundreds of thousands of votes had disappeared in the state of Georgia, which was won by Biden. As USA Today reported, there is no evidence for such a claim.

The network last year doubled down on baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems, even after the company sent a letter threatening to sue it for defamation. But as Insider’s Jacob Shamsian previously reported, the network in January quietly removed articles about election conspiracy theories from its website, including articles about Dominion, Smartmatic, and pro-Trump lawyers Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Lin Wood.

Herring defended the network’s reporting to The New York Times.

“A review process with multiple checks is in place to ensure that news reporting meets the company’s journalist standards,” Herring said. “And, yes, we’ve had our fair share of mistakes, but we do our best to keep them to a minimum and learn from our missteps.”

Two former employees also interviewed by the Times said they believed the network’s coverage was unbiased. In total, 16 current and former employees told The New York Times they believed the network had aired misleading or outright false information.