Rachel Maddow Sued for Telling the Truth by Trump's New Favorite Right-Wing Wacko Conspiracy Network, Trump Propaganda Outlet One America News. It's a Nuisance Suit. She'll Win.
September 10, 2019
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BUZZFLASH NEWS UPDATE
Trump is playing Fox News off a relative newcomer to right-wing propaganda TV, One America News Network. The network was started in 2013 by the Herring family, and is headquartered in San Diego.
One America News filed suit in San Diego on Monday, seeking $10 million for alleged defamation by Maddow.
According to the Associated Press (AP),
The lawsuit contends that Maddow’s comment on her July 22 MSNBC show were retaliation after OAN President Charles Herring accused cable television giant Comcast of censorship. The suit contends that Comcast refused to carry the channel because it “counters the liberal politics of Comcast’s own news channel, MSNBC.”
A week after Herring sent an email to a Comcast executive, Maddow opened her MSNBC show by referring to a report in the Daily Beast that said an OAN employee also worked for Sputnik News, which is linked to the Russian government.
“In this case, the most obsequiously pro-Trump right-wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda,” Maddow said on “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
“Their on-air U.S. politics reporter is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government,” Maddow said.
Maddow’s accusation focused on on-air reporter for One America News, Kristian Rouz, who is also a reporter for Sputnik. Sputnik was founded by the Russian government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya.
America News claims that Rouz is only a freelancer for Sputnik, but he admits that he has written more than 1200 articles for the Russian government propaganda outlet.
An October, 2017, Independent article labels One America News a “conspiracy theorist news network” that has a synergistic relationship with the Trump administration:
One of the most called-upon reporters in the White House press corps during briefings with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders [now departed] and her predecessor Sean Spicer is Trey Yingst, who covers the beat for OANN.
The network has become known for reporting Mr Trump’s claims about everything from how the mainstream media was biased for covering audio tapes from Entertainment Tonight of then-candidate Trump using lewd language to speak about women to the crowd size at his inauguration.
It also pushed a story line that former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich - murdered in Washington DC in July 2016 - likely died because he was “investigating several cases involving the DNC's electoral fraud and voter suppression, and was set to testify on the case of Hillary Clinton's email investigation.”
Police have released no such evidence, no proof has been presented by the network in support of this theory, and his family has asked repeatedly in public that his death not be politicized.
In a July, 2018, article, Vanity Fair also tagged One America News Network as one “which often promotes conspiracy theories.” The One America News entry in Wikipedia is filled with a list of just some of the fringe conspiracy theories that the network has reported on as fact, or as the Trump administration refers to them, “alternative facts.” Indeed, it appears, as with Fox News, Trump obtains many of his conspiracy theories and misinformation from One America News.
The One America News Network also names Comcast, MSNBC and NBCUniversal Media in its lawsuit.
According to the AP, an attorney for the NBCUniversal News Group charges that One America News “publishes content collected or created by a journalist who is also paid by the Russian government for writing over a thousand articles. Ms. Maddow’s recounting of this arrangement is substantially true and therefore not actionable.”
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