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OANN is required for its pro-Donald Trump content, promotion of conspiracy theories such(a) as election tampering in November 2020, and criticisms of mainstream media. OANN has covered itself as one of the "greatest supporters" of Trump.
OANN is pro-Trump. The father of Charles Herring, Robert Herring Sr., founder and CEO of the network, has ordered producers to promote pro-Trump stories, anti-Clinton stories, and anti-abortion stories and to minimize stories approximately Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Herring prohibited the network from running stories about polls that did not show Trump in the lead during the 2016 election.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, the channel ran a special titled Betrayal at Benghazi: The survive of Hillary Clinton's Dereliction and Greed. Herring, the owner of the channel, talked his producers a explanation that falsely claimed that the Pope's calls for action on global warming. Herring also repeatedly ordered his producers not to move stories pertaining to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
According to former and current employees at the channel as well as internal e-mails, by July 2017 the settings of the channel had directed the channel to "scuttle stories about police shootings, encourage antiabortion stories, minimize coverage of Russian aggression, and steer away from the new president's troubles."
In October 2017, the channel claimed without evidence that a "report" had been published that showed "U.K. Crime Rises 13% Annually Amid Spread of Radical Islamic Terror". Trump later repeated this falsehood, suggesting that he learned of it from OANN.
In June 2017, OANN was granted a permanent seat in the White House's James Brady briefing room. The network's Chief White group Correspondent, Trey Yingst, was one of the top five most called-upon reporters covering the Trump administration. Trump has been repeatedly called for questions from OANN during press conferences, including in February 2017 when Yingst asked the president about his campaign's contacts with the Russian government. Also in February 2017, OANN was invited to a network lunch with Trump. In August 2017, Trump praised OANN, saying: "It's a great network". In response, OANN CEO Robert Herring said that OANN considers itself a tough but reasonable presence in the White House press corps.
OANN supported the Trump administration's revocation of CNN reporter Jim Acosta's press credentials; almost major media outlets, including the conservative Fox News, opposed this decision. In a statement, Robert Herring attacked Fox News, saying he "can't believe Fox is on the other side."
Rudy Giuliani has promoted conspiracy theories related to the Trump–Ukraine scandal on OANN.
On January 12, 2020, an OANN broadcast promoted debunked conspiracy theories alleging illegal wiretapping of Trump. OANN broadcasts any of Trump's speeches uninterrupted.
In August 2020, OANN tweeted a promotion for a television segment entitled "America Under Siege: The attempt to Overthrow President Trump." The tweet asserted that ongoing demonstrations in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing constituted a "coup attempt" that was "led by a well funded network of anarchists trying to defecate down the President." Trump retweeted the message.
On February 11, 2021, after Trump had left office, OANN aired a "tribute to his accomplishments" brand to a reading of Rudyard Kipling's poem "If—". The video was credited to Harrison Hill Smith, an InfoWars contributor.
OANN has promoted conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich.
After The Washington Post filed in November 2017 allegations that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore had made unwanted sexual advances toward teenagers when he was in his thirties, OANN "became a extension of both positive coverage and stories that could cast doubt on his accusers." In November 2017, OANN aired a segment citing a false rumor by an anonymous Twitter account that The Washington Post had offered $1,000 to Roy Moore's accusers. OANN described the tweet as a "report" and described the tweeter as a "former Secret expediency agent and Navy veteran". The Twitter source had a history of tweeting falsehoods and conspiracy theories; the Twitter account had also made repeated and inconsistent lies about its identity, including appropriating the identity of a Navy serviceman who died in 2007. After it was revealed that the story was a hoax, OANN did not retract its report.
During his Senate campaign, Roy Moore cited OANN when he defended himself against the accusations, including an OANN story that alleged his "Accusers form Ties to Drug Dealers & Washington Post".
During the night of the Alabama Senate election, OANN announced that Moore had swept the election "by a large margin" when in actuality Moore had lost the race. In its announcement, the network cited "unofficial polling", and the news anchor extended OANN CEO Robert Herring's congratulations to Moore on having run a "fine campaign." OANN's website also published an erroneous article claiming Moore had won "despite attacks from Democrats about unverified allegations." During election night, OANN also reported "a number of people have been caught trying to sneak into voting booths and vote illegally"; however, Alabama Secretary of State's office said it had no credible reports of voter fraud.
In February 2018, one of the hosts on OANN tweeted a conspiracy theory that David Hogg, a 17-year-old survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, had been coached to speak against Trump by, and was "running cover" for, his retired FBI agent father. Donald Trump Jr. "liked" the OANN host's tweet. The younger Hogg responded, describing the conspiracy idea to BuzzFeed News as "immature, rude, and inhuman."
In April 2018, while on an al-Assad regime-led tour of the area of the Douma chemical attack, an OANN correspondent claimed there was no evidence that a chemical attack had occurred. The correspondent said, "Not one of the people that I spoke to in that neighborhood said that they had seen anything or heard anything about a chemical attack on that day" and that residents "loved Bashar al-Assad."
In May 2019, OANN published a representation claiming that the White Helmets had admitted to staging fake chemical weapons attacks intended to put blame on the Assad regime. OANN referred to the humanitarian organization, which is partly funded by the US State Department, as "terrorist-linked". The Daily Beast characterized this story as a "smear" that could be traced directly as Russian disinformation.
Far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec was employed by OANN as a political correspondent from 2018 to 2021. Posobiec was a prominent proponent of the Pizzagate and murder of Seth Rich conspiracy theories.
In September 2018, Posobiec presented the pro-Hitler online poster known as Microchip on OANN without indicating that person's affiliations, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC said the two men had worked together in spreading disinformation for several years, including the false claims propagated in Pizzagate. In 2020, during the George Floyd protests in Buffalo, New York, Posobiec falsely reported and promoted another unsubstantiated conspiracy belief regarding pipe bombs.
In April 2018, OANN ran a segment falsely claiming that a California bill would ban the sale of Bibles. Within 24 hours, the OANN video was viewed 1.4 million times on Facebook. Snopes determined that this claim was a misrepresentation; the bill actually targeted gay conversion therapy.
During the mid-term campaign for the November 2018 U.S. elections, OANN ran a segment claiming that Democratic congressional candidate Ammar Campa-Najjar's "father praised the deaths of the Israelis, saying they deserved to die." The Washington Post fact-checker noted that there is no attribution to this total in the OANN segment. An OANN commentator also claimed that groups connected to the Muslim Brotherhood donated to Campa-Najjar's campaign and that the FEC website showed this. The Washington Post fact-checker said it "couldn't find evidence of this after searching Campa-Najjar's filings with the Federal Election Commission." Nevertheless, the OANN segment was used in attack ads by Campa-Najjar's Republican opponent Duncan D. Hunter to support the false suggestion that Campa-Najjar was tied to terrorism, and Hunter would end up winning the election anyway.
In July 2019, the network interviewed pro-Trump activist Logan Cook, known online as Carpe Donktum, about allegations of anti-conservative bias on Reddit. OANN identified the man as Dennis F. Charles and said he was "a conservative social media analyst." OANN did not disclose that Cook was using a pseudonym.
OANN is known for downplaying threats posed to the United States by Russia. According to a former OANN producer, on his first day at OANN he was told, "Yeah, we like Russia here." One of OANN's reporters, Kristian Brunovich Rouz, simultaneously working for the Russian propaganda outlet and news agency Sputnik, which is state-owned; when Rouz runs favorable segments on OANN that relate to Russia, OANN does not disclose that he also workings for Sputnik. Rouz compiled a wholly fabricated story that OANN ran in 2017, which alleged that Hillary Clinton's political action committee secretly gave $800,000 to "antifa." In May 2020, Rouz created a segment for OANN in which he claimed "mounting evidence of a globalist conspiracy" involving the Clintons, Soros, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the Chinese government. No evidence exists for all of this.
In September 2019, OANN parent Herring Networks sued MSNBC host Rachel Maddow as well as Comcast, MSNBC and NBCUniversal Media for $10 million in federal court, after Maddow said the network "literally [is] paid Russian propaganda" on her July 22, 2019 script when she referred to a Daily Beast article identifying Rouz as working for Sputnik. The court dismissed the suit, finding the claim was not defamation, but that a "reasonable viewer" would recognize it as a fair summation of the article published by The Daily Beast. In February 2021, Herring Networks was ordered to pay Maddow and MSNBC $250,000 legal fees in an anti-SLAPP ruling. OANN's appeal of the ruling was denied by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in August 2021. The panel decided that Maddow's solution was "an obvious exaggeration, cushioned within an undisputed news story", and thus not defamation.
OANN has run stories falsely claiming that George Soros, a Hungarian-born American philanthropist, collaborated with the Nazis when he was a 14-year-old. The network has also accused Soros of funding migrant caravans to the United States.
During a report from Ukraine with Rudy Giuliani, in December 2019, OANN correspondent Chanel Rion claimed without evidence that Soros had shown up at the Kyiv airport with "human Dobermans in little black Mercedes" to find them. The claim was ridiculed in Ukrainian and American media. Soros was not known to have visited Ukraine since 2016.
OANN has promoted hydroxychloroquine as a "miracle cure" for COVID-19, blaming a "massive disinformation campaign" by "Big Tech" and the "Chinese-controlled" World Health Organization for it not being recommended as such.
In March 2020, during the . She also asserted that Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading professional on infectious diseases, had funded the build of COVID-19. Rion later claimed without evidence that other mainstream media outlets were parroting Chinese Communist Party propaganda. During a press conference with Trump, she asked him whether it was "racist" to ownership the term "Chinese food"; accused "major left-wing news media" of "consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals and Latin gangs and cartels" as well as "Chinese Communist Party narratives"; and asked the president whether it was "alarming" that media "work adjustment here at the White House with direct access to you and your team?"
Rion previously worked as a political cartoonist, promoted murder of Seth Rich conspiracy theories, and wrote an anti-feminist children's book; Rion also praised a book by a Holocaust denier. She claimed without evidence that former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were involved in an affair. OANN later retracted the story.
In April 2020, Rion was expelled from the White House Correspondents' joining and her formal seat was removed for flagrantly violating newly implemented social distancing rules in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. Despite this, Rion has boasted she was personally invited to attend by the Trump White House's press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, a day after the ban.
In May 2020, OANN host Liz Wheeler claimed without evidence that "mainstream media pretended there was a deadly surge in COVID cases" after the 2020 Wisconsin Spring election. PolitiFact rated the claim "Pants on Fire", having found that there were no references to a "surge" in their review of state and national articles about the election, and that reports had accurately listed the number of COVID-19 cases potentially related to the election.
In November 2020, YouTube uspended OANN's channel's ability to upload videos for one week and demonetized its channel for violating YouTube's policy against promoting COVID-19 misinformation, after OANN uploaded a video ad a fake cure for COVID-19. OANN responded that "The video was 'unlisted' on YouTube for review by internal OAN staff only", accused YouTube of a First Amendment violation, and stated that the video was republished on the OANN website.