One America News, the little misinformation chain that feeds Trump's tweets

It is Donald Trump's latest conspiratorial extravagance. The president suggested on Tuesday June 9 on Twitter that an incident between a 75-year-old protester and the Buffalo police was a "coup" of the "antifa" movement. An unsubstantiated assertion contradicted by surveillance videos which was immediately criticized by all the media. Even the very pro-Trump channel Fox News has distanced itself from this umpteenth controversial presidential tweet. There was little left but the small channel One America News (OAN) to go in the direction of the American president.

Buffalo protest shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?

This support is not surprising: OAN has only returned courtesy to the billionaire president who had unearthed his new conspiracy theory by watching this ultra-conservative channel. This is not the first time that the White House tenant has touted the work of One America News. He cites it almost systematically as an example when he judges that Fox News is not showing enough kindness towards him. Nor does he miss an opportunity to thank her in politically troubled times for him, such as when OAN had relentlessly attacked the Democrats during the dismissal process in 2019 or when the chain considered that Donald Trump had done a job " remarkable "for fighting the coronavirus epidemic.

Alternative to Fox

Since the start of the health crisis, the American president has been promoting OAN more and more often on Twitter, the Mother Jones website found. A boon for this small chain founded in San Diego in 2013 by Robert Herring, an entrepreneur who got rich in Tech. The chain has, in fact, only about 14,000 viewers in major American cities, against 631,000 for Fox News, according to an estimate by Nielsen Media Research. But thanks to Donald Trump's Twitter feed, OAN has an audience of 82 million Internet users ... 

Thank you to @OANN One America News for your fair coverage and brilliant reporting. It is appreciated by many people trying so hard to find a new, consistent and powerful VOICE! See you tonight at the Big Rally in Minneapolis.

From the start, this channel presented itself as an alternative to Fox News, pushing the plug on conspiracy theories much further than its big conservative sister, and putting the political cursor further to the right. A niche that would gain popularity with the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene in 2015. OAN was quick to embrace Trumpism, and, shortly after the coming to power of the businessman converted into a conservative politician, the channel has become the first media to broadcast the speeches of the tribune in full.

Donald Trump, "as a keen media observer, quickly noted the existence of OAN," said the New York Times. The White House welcomed with open arms a correspondent for this channel with a paltry audience alongside the mainstream media for press briefings of the president.

From conspirator to conspirator and a half

It is Chanel Rion who fulfills this role with deference to the president who does not fail to irritate these colleagues. It is a pure product of the type of "journalism" promoted by Robert Herring for his channel. A convinced conspirator, Chanel Rion circulated theories suggesting that leading democrats belonged to a Satanist sect practicing ritual murders or that relatives of Hillary Clinton were responsible for the death of an employee of the Democratic Party. On her site, she presents herself as an anti-Clinton, fiercely opposed to Barack Obama and "all liberal-left intellectuals". She also accompanied former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who became Donald Trump's lawyer and henchman, in Hungary to "investigate" the alleged shady cases of the Biden family.

Despite this impressive Trumpo-conspiratorial CV, Chanel Rion is not the star of the chain. The man of the moment is called Kristian Rouz. It was he who inspired Donald Trump's tweet by saying on the air that the scene of police brutality against the seventies in Buffalo was just a set-up. "Information" that he went to look for on "Conservative Treehouse", a blog that overflows with so many conspiracy theories that even some far-right sites like Breitbart find him "bizarre," said The Daily Beast.

This inclination of "Conservative Treehouse" for the most extreme conspiracy should not disturb Kristian Rouz, himself a fervent follower of these theories. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, he assured the air that the virus was used as a weapon of "population control" by the Chinese government, by Bill Gates, Georges Soros, Anthony Fauci (the respected specialist in infectious diseases of the American administration), and the "eternal" Bill and Hillary Clinton.

YIKES! OAN ran a segment last night on "mounting evidence of a globalist conspiracy" by the Clintons, Soros, Gates, Fauci, & Chinese gov't to use coronavirus "to establish sweeping population control" by backing remdesvir over hydroxychlorquine. It quotes Plandemic's Mikovits! pic.twitter.com/yL8pOmmYB1

This "journalist" of Russian origin has also drawn criticism for working, in parallel with One America News, for Sputnik, a Russian press organ considered as a propaganda tool of the Kremlin.

Dangerous promotion

But the reputation of the chain in the far-right nebula owes a lot to the personality of another member of OAN: Jack Posobiec, alias "Mr Pizzagate". It was he who popularized, in 2016, this crazy thesis that a Washington pizzeria served as a rear base for a vast pedophile network involving several prominent members of the Democratic Party. Fervent support of Donald Trump, he made himself known to the French public during the 2017 presidential election when he was one of the first to circulate the "MacronLeaks", these tens of thousands of emails online after a hack targeting relatives of Emmanuel Macron.

This chain is therefore carried by personalities who act as knights of "trumpism", even before doing journalism. That the President of the United States promotes it at tweet length could, in normal times, pass for the umpteenth whim of a "man who places loyalty towards his person above all", as the Mother Jones site recalls . But in the wake of a major health crisis, and demonstrations against police violence, this highlighting of a media that also openly pours into disinformation and conspiracy poses "a real risk to the security of people," says Phil Napoli, media and propaganda specialist at Duke University, North Carolina, interviewed by CNN. In times of crisis, recalls this expert, the promotion of unreliable information by the authorities can lead people to adopt risky behaviors or put (a little) oil on the fire of social tensions (already well fanned).

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