By Rick Manning
Censorship of conservative voices by establishment media owners has hit a new low with the decision by AT&T and its subsidiary DirecTV to drop Newsmax from their offerings. One snide commenter was quoted as saying that conservatives have Fox News, why do they need Newsmax or OAN for that matter.
The answer is obvious. As Fox News pushes more and more to the left, viewers who want a variety of honest opinions and reporting are moving to Newsmax and where it is available One America News. With quality hosts like Sean Spicer (who I have known for more than fifteen years) asking tough questions of top quality guests, Newsmax keeps Fox News and their management team honest.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy has spoken out on the Newsmax cancellation by AT&T/DirecTV promising to take action.
U.S. Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Mike Lee, and Tom Cotton have demanded an explanation from AT&T and DirecTV.
Americans for Limited Government, after a conversation with NewsMax host Dick Morris, is also taking action by providing our 100,000+ subscribers and just under 500,000 social media followers the opportunity to have their voice heard as well. By providing a direct link to email the CEOs of both AT&T and DirecTV urging them to not cancel NewsMax.
These direct action campaigns focusing on business executives have proven highly effective in raising top management awareness on issues ranging from urging dozens of major companies to not impose vaccine mandates to pushing Major League Baseball owners to abandon their woke agenda.
AT&T and DirecTV are claiming that they want to keep Newsmax on their platform, but the real story is that DirecTV is more than thirty percent owned by a hedge-fund group that owns something called Vice TV, a far left talk formatted channel which receives half of Newsmax’s viewership. Yet, Vice TV has been getting paid vastly more for their poorly consumed programming than Newsmax receives for theirs, and now Newsmax joins OAN on the shelf and unavailable to DirecTV and other AT&T media subscribers.
The recent censorship imposed by AT&T’s decision to remove Newsmax from its DirectTV lineup was transparently political. DirecTV refused to offer NewsMax a subscriber fee (the equivalent of economic life blood), even though DirecTV gives millions of dollars to left-wing channel VICE TV even as its ratings are about half of those Newsmax provides.
The release of emails by Twitter showing the FBI’s pressure campaign to restrict and shut down voices which did not confirm to the approved federal government narratives on the 2020 election, COVID protocols and treatments and the Hunter Biden laptop should send shivers up every Americans spine.
Given this history of political abuse and intimidation in threatening social media platforms, it is reasonable for Congress to ask the FBI and its censorship cousin, the Department of Homeland Security, whether they have a hand in the One America News and Newsmax cable deplatforming?
America is a nation of diverse ideas. This is why the First Amendment protection of free speech is important to the health of our country and political system as a whole.
It never ceases to amaze how afraid the left is of discussion of issues from a center-right perspective. A fear that drives them to purge entire profitable channels from their platforms to prevent the contagion of critical thinking from spreading across the land.
The left has ABC, CBS, NBC, Public Broadcasting System, CNN, MSNBC, Vice TV and a vast majority of entertainment industry working to advance their ideas. Isn’t it amazing that with all that firepower, they considered Newsmax and OAN threats to their control of what ideas can be tolerated in their America.
Fortunately, Constitutional America allows uncomfortable, new, provocative ideas to be heard and debated. And it is driving the institutional left up the wall.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
