Washington (AFP)

"Fox, it's clearly not what it was," was recently indignant Donald Trump, in a tackle on his long-favorite channel, and that has made him well.

After years of romance, the American president seems in disenchantment, turning his gaze to a younger and more right channel: One America News Network (OANN).

This small channel was only launched in 2013 by a technology millionaire, Robert Herring, who sought to offer a more conservative option among media giants.

Since then, OANN has managed to win the favor of Donald Trump, who has again covered with praise last week by pinning, tweeting, Fox and his pet peeve CNN.

"Watching CNN's fake news is better than watching Shepard Smith, the show at @FoxNews' lowest audiences, and as soon as it's possible, I'll put @OANN," he wrote. on its account to 63 million subscribers, about one of the star presenters of the channel.

Since March, he has retweeted OANN articles or reported that he enjoyed the channel more than a dozen times.

To the delight of its founder: "The President's favorite channel", is it written in the tweet pinned to Robert Herring's Twitter profile.

And when Fox interrupted a Donald Trump campaign rally last week, OANN's boss tweeted, "We're never going to stop!"

- Thank you, "it's very good" -

Their relationship goes back a long way. By 2015, Trump had been interviewed by John McCain's former running mate for the presidential Sarah Palin, who was co-presenting one of the shows, "On Point."

Then at his first press conference as president, in January 2017, he gave a round of questions to OANN, then chosen, among much more renowned media, dozens of times during the daily press conferences of his spokesmen during his first 100 days in power.

And during his press conference after a landmark summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump publicly praised the work of the channel by giving the floor to his White House correspondent, Emerald Robinson.

"Thank you for the kind way you treat us, we appreciate it," he said. "Really, it's very good, it's very beautiful what you do".

Headquartered in San Diego, California, OANN does not abide by Nielsen's benchmarking measures, which are benchmarks in the industry.

If it is defined as a chain of "pure information, no opinion", its pro-Trump bias is obvious, had given in 2017 to the Washington Post more than a dozen employees and former employees.

Accused of relaying conspiracy theories, OANN also tends to give an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-abortion tone to its reports, according to Media Matters, a media observatory marked on the left.

- Badly treated -

Despite his criticism, Donald Trump has not yet completely detached from Fox, which he faithfully follows the morning show "Fox & Friends", which it is not rare that he participates, by phone or improvised interview in front of the White House.

Often when he surprises by evoking topics to the debottled, the show spoke about it in the morning.

Some links are strong: one of the big names of Fox, Sean Hannity, intervened at the same time as Donald Trump during a campaign rally for the mid-term elections of 2018.

But in the run-up to the presidential election, Donald Trump publicly annoyed Fox television-related TV meetings with several Democratic candidates who hope to challenge him in November 2020.

"Hard to believe @FoxNews spoils airtime for" Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, fifth in polls for the Democratic primary, had tweeted in May. "Fox is going more and more to the losing side (bad) by covering the Democrats".

The polls conducted by Fox News for the presidential election also have the gift of annoying him. The Republican has seen its popularity drop to 43% in mid-August, the same poll giving him losing in possible duels with the main Democratic candidates.

At the end of July, he was amazed: Fox's polls "always treated me badly".

© 2019 AFP