Farewell to OAN, the Network for Loons and the President They Loved

Once upon a time there was a cable news network that nobody liked. Nobody except the loons, that is: those very special people who willfully eschew logical reasoning and the established corpus of knowledge in favor of febrile theories, weird cultural grievances, and other made-up bullshit. As luck would have it, there were enough loons out there for the network to be aired by many cable providers, and to reap millions of dollars in carriage fees year after year after year. Then, in a shocking development, one of America’s foremost loons was elected president—and One America News Network, the network that nobody liked, found itself having A Moment.

It is now July 2022, and OAN’s moment is definitively over. On Sunday, July 31, the network’s carriage deal with Verizon Fios expires and will not be renewed, meaning that OAN will no longer be included in any of Verizon’s cable packages. The Verizon deal is the second major carriage deal that OAN has lost this year; its lucrative distribution agreement with DirecTV expired and was not renewed in April. As of August 1, the network will only be viewable via certain streaming services, its own app, and on certain smaller cable providers such as GCI, which operates in Alaska. Yukon ho, conspiracists!