Senior adviser to the United States Agency for Global Media Kari Lake has announced that One America News Network (OAN) will provide “newsfeed services” for free to USAGM networks, including Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), Radio Martí, and Voice of America (VOA).

The announcement came after weeks of efforts by the Trump administration to dismantle the agency. President Donald Trump has issued an executive order mandating that USAGM “reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”

That resulted in more than 1,000 employees being placed on leave and the termination of 600 contracts. But U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a preliminary injunction in April blocking it.

The decision to offer OAN could greatly expand the potential reach of content from the cable network, which has been a plaintiff in several high-profile libel lawsuits and was dropped by DirecTV and Verizon in 2022. OAN is no longer carried by a major pay TV provider.

[Editor's note: On May 14, 2025 Herring Networks, the parent company of OAN, announced that its networks OAN and AWE would be carried on certain Charter's Spectrum video packages.]

But the agreement has proved controversial and was immediately condemned by VOA staffers. “VOA is not to be the voice of left America nor the voice of right America,” said Steve Herman, chief national correspondent for VOA, who was quoted by the Washington Post. “USAGM cannot dictate [that] VOA run OAN content. It would be a violation of our fire wall and our charter, which are laws,” he said.

In a social media post on X, Lake admitted that “In my current role as Senior Advisor to USAGM, I don't have editorial control over the content of VOA and OCB programming, but I can ensure our outlets have reliable and credible options as they work to craft their reporting and news programs.”

Lake explained that “This idea came about after OCB suggested we explore OAN as a newsfeed option for the Miami-based, U.S. Government-funded news operation broadcasting to Cuba. At their suggestion, I reached out to OAN, and they offered to provide their newsfeed and video service free-of-charge."

"This is an enormous benefit to the American taxpayer, who is the sole-source of funding for USAGM's news outlets, which broadcast only to international audiences," Lake said. "And every day I look for ways to save American taxpayers money. Bringing in OAN as a video/news source does both.”

Lake described “OAN is one of the few family-owned American media networks left in the United States,” but did not mention controversies surrounding the network.

The network’s promotion of conspiracy theories promoting the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump prompted libel suits from Dominion Voting Systems, Smartmatic and a Dominion executive. OAN settled the suits by Smartmatic and the Dominion executive; the Dominion suit is ongoing.

Following the settlement of the two cases, OAN did not issue a public apology, but it did quietly delete the articles advancing conspiracy theories about Dominion from its website in 2021.

A Southern Poverty Law Center investigation into commentator Jack Posobiec, who was a host on OAN between 2018 and 2021, found that “Posobiec—a Trump favorite—has collaborated with white supremacists, neo-fascists and antisemites for years, while producing propaganda that Trump and his inner circle have publicly celebrated.”

“Jack Posobiec’s extensive ties to white supremacists should serve as a wake-up call for anyone who hasn’t made the connection between Trump’s MAGA movement and hate,” said Michael Edison Hayden, the SPLC senior investigative reporter who covered the story about Posobiec and his ties to white supremacy and the White House.

In recent years, OAN has worked to find an audience with content to the right of Fox News Channel.

A 2021 Pew Research survey found that only 7% of Americans got political news each week from OAN and that their viewers skewed older and less educated.

It found that while Fox News has a core audience of conservative Republicans, it also has large audiences among Democrats. “The much smaller Newsmax and OAN audiences are made up largely of older and White Americans and conservative Republicans,” the 2021 survey found.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Common Cause has commended Verizon for its decision to drop One America News Network from its channel line-up at the end of July. 

The decision by DirecTV to drop OAN earlier this year and Verizon’s decision not to renew carriage, means that no major pay TV outlet will be carrying the conservative news network, which has been under fire for  promoting false and misleading information about the COVID-19 pandemic, the results of the 2020 election, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

Conversative news organizations OAN, Fox News and Newsmax also face a billion-dollar libel lawsuit brought by the Dominion Voting Systems and OAN faces a separate libel suit from Smartmatic, another maker of voting machines. 

Common Cause and a coalition of civil-rights, human-rights and media-justice organizations have pushed the major carriers to drop OANN since 2021. Last year, the coalition organized a letter to the CEOs of AT&T and DirecTV urging their companies to sever business ties with the network. After more than 170,000 people signed a petition calling on AT&T and DirectTV to cut all ties with OANN,  DirecTV dropped the channel from its lineup.

“With the move by Verizon Fios, One America News Network will be left without a major carrier to spread its often harmful and dangerous disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories,” said Yosef Getachew, Common Cause Media and Democracy program director. “This is a welcome change but long overdue. OANN has spread lies that have hindered U.S. efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, undermined Americans’ faith in our elections, and fed the Big Lie narrative that led to a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. We hope those remaining small pay-tv providers and streaming services still carrying OANN will follow suit and deprive the outlet of any platform to spread harmful conspiracy theories that have done real world harm. No company should profit from spreading content that endangers our democracy."

SAN DIEGO—Faced with limited distribution on traditional pay TV providers, the conservative One America News Network ("OAN") has further expanded its over-the-air distribution with a deal to make OAN Plus available as a digital subchannel on WOSC-CD channel 61.8 in the Pittsburgh DMA.

OAN lost its distribution on DirecTV earlier this year amid controversies over the news net spreading misinformation. The channel has never been carried on a number of other major pay TV providers, including Comcast, Charter and Dish.

To compensate, the company has more than doubled the OTA household penetration of its broadcast over-the-air (OTA) channel variant, OAN Plus, to more than ten million new OTA-only households.

"We have been incredibly encouraged by the momentum that our OAN Plus channel is building in broadcast and we continue to hear that the significance and relevance of the OAN brand is valuable" said Alex Kopacz, executive vice president of content distribution and strategy at OAN. "We recognize the growth of broadcast OTA viewership and adding a new top-25 DMA like Pittsburgh will further accelerate our ongoing broadcast strategy."

WOSC-CD, owned by Pittsburgh based The Videohouse, boasts one of the country's strongest Class A broadcast signals and reaches more than 1.6 million households across the Pittsburgh DMA, the broadcaster said. 

SAN DIEGO & LINKÖPING, SWEDEN—Mobile users can now upload breaking news video directly to One America News Network’s news bureaus via the new OAN Stringer app. Created in partnership with Sweden startup Stringer Systems, the OAN Stringer app also features a Web-based management system and server back-end software that allows content to be examined, rated, organized and processed.

With the OAN Stringer app, OAN now has the ability to use authentic and authorized content from its users. “Our viewers will get a personal, safe and direct channel into our editor’s room, submitting images in just a few clicks,” said Robert Herring, Sr., CEO of OAN. “Our editors will be able to enrich our conventional sources of new coverage with reliable viewer content fully in line with our highest journalistic standards."

The OAN Stringer app is available for both iPhone and Android devices.