Gang violence at the top of the hour, baby pandas at the bottom. The same invisible enemies too, so that even the nightmares come wrapped in a warm blanket. It’s built for the members of an aging #MAGA army who want to be comforted by news the way they remember it. In both appearance and metabolism, OAN is a nostalgia machine-familiar, reassuring, the Turner Classic Movies of cable-news networks. Everything was so earnest and slapdash, and so transparently inane. As I watched One America, it gradually dawned on me that I was watching Anchorman. Trump’s frequent shout-outs have turned OAN into a minor media sensation, and its coverage has been described as “fast paced,” which is only true if you’re comparing it with the burning-Yule-log channel. All the talent needs to do is look into the camera and read off the teleprompter. In the age of alternative facts, though, a news network doesn’t need polish to be dangerous. I spent hours watching OAN, and the whole time I found myself yearning for the skill and professionalism of Fox News.

To watch OAN is to experience the Trump presidency the way Trump himself would cover it, if he built a network from the ground up and then, as he did with his administration, hired amateurs to run it. On the other hand, he’s right: At OAN, what comes out of their mouths is far more important than how well they say it. Now on the one hand, ouch-on-air talent likes nothing more than hearing their boss say they weren’t chosen for their talent. “Our big secret and a key differentiator of OAN from other cable news networks is that the star of OAN’s news lineup is the news, not the talent,” Charles Herring, the network’s president, told me by email recently. Soon enough, The New York Times reported that administration officials were pushing the intelligence services to investigate, even as the theory was debunked on the front page. Recently, OAN has been advancing the theory, without any evidence to support it, that the coronavirus was developed in a Chinese bioweapons lab, and spread from there. OAN has referred to the 2016 murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee employee, as if it might have been a political assassination tin-foil-hat corners of the internet have connected it to the leaking of DNC emails. (Posobiec has backed down from the Pizzagate theory, telling The Washington Post in 2016 that he thought his live-streamed look into the pizzeria “could just show it was a regular pizza place.”) OAN covered the so-called migrant caravan-a slow-moving wave of migrants that began rolling north from Central America in 2018-as if it were a Category 5 hurricane. In 2018, well after the debunking of Pizzagate-the allegation that Hillary Clinton and a secret cabal were running a pedophile ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant-the network hired one of Pizzagate’s chief boosters, Jack Posobiec, as an on-air correspondent. One America News predates the Trump presidency-it launched in 2013-so its rise is less a response to Trumpism than an extension of the besieged, paranoid worldview that got him elected in the first place. Or, to put the relationship in tabloid terms familiar to Trump: He treats OAN like his sidepiece, and Fox News like a future ex-wife. If you’re wondering just how deep the fealty goes, consider this actual headline that ran on at the end of March, when Trump was still in his denial phase about the coronavirus: “President Handling Emergency Well in First Term.” So well, in fact, we should just give him that second term right now, wouldn’t you say? Every so often, Trump and Fox News have a lover’s spat, and this is when he really turns on the charm toward OAN-retweeting its praise of him, calling on its correspondents at press briefings two days in a row. Every day, Trump does something that catches OAN’s attention, and it’s off to the races.

Mostly this is because One America News seems to agree with Trump about everything, in the same way a dog agrees to chase its own tail. O ne America News, or OAN, or OANN-whichever you like, it’s all the same thing-is Donald Trump’s favorite cable-news channel.

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