“We never want to see it in America.” While four Republican senators, including Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, sent their own letter demanding answers from DirecTV.ĭuring a Friday appearance on Newsmax, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, who floated the idea of holding hearings last month, turned up the heat on DirecTV and AT&T executives. “We have seen this kind of censorship in Saudi Arabia, communist China, and Soviet Russia,” Representative Ken Buck said in a floor speech. A week after Newsmax was dropped, 18 Republicans took to the floor of the House of Representatives to rail against DirecTV, characterizing a garden-variety carriage dispute as something far more dystopian. Trump called it a “disgusting move” and vowed to end “all association” with AT&T and DirecTV. With neither side able to strike a deal before the deadline on January 24, DirecTV dropped Newsmax from its lineup––and the network’s boosters have been going to the mattresses ever since. A dustup between a cable network and distributor is suddenly rocket fuel for partisan warfare. And Newsmax itself has had plenty of tussles with carriers, including in 2016, when it was dropped by DirecTV before returning the following year.īut in early 2023, Newsmax is wielding real clout among a newly empowered Republican Party fixated on allegations of deplatforming and censorship, recently using its majority in the House to spend a day probing Twitter’s 2020 decision to briefly block users from sharing a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Last month, YouTube TV dropped MLB Network after the two sides were unable to reach a carriage agreement. Such disputes between networks and carriers are common in the television industry, but they are often confined to only the most arcane arenas, typically unfolding in boardrooms and trade publications. After months of talks, the two sides remained at an impasse. Van Susteren, for her part, had only previously mentioned DirecTV on Twitter when complaining about her inability to watch the Green Bay Packers.īut Van Susteren’s call for a congressional inquiry was a harbinger of a coming fight––and perhaps a warning shot to DirecTV, which at the time was locked in negotiations with Newsmax over a new carriage deal. The network filed a lawsuit against the satellite television provider, much of which was later thrown out, and Donald Trump called for boycotts, but the controversy––like OAN itself––had largely faded into obscurity. One America News, or OAN, the far-right, pro-Trump network, had been dropped by DirecTV last spring, causing a minor stir among Republicans and conservatives. “Deplatforming conservative media is a threat to our freedoms,” wrote Van Susteren, a former Fox News host who was hired last year by Newsmax, the upstart conservative cable news network. In early January, the veteran anchor Greta Van Susteren had a message for the newly sworn-in lawmakers on Capitol Hill: Congress “should investigate AT&T, DirecTV for censorship of OAN.”
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