Tag: AT&T

AT&T All In on the Woke Agenda

AT&T and its subsidiary DirecTV recently dropped Newsmax from its lineup, while leaving in place 22 liberal news channels.

The subsidiary canceled the fourth highest-rated news channel, which left 25 million cable viewers scrambling to get their preferred channel from a different source.

DirecTV’s parent company doesn’t appear to be operating under any kind of conventional business model. The blatant ideological discrimination begs the question: Just how woke is the telecommunications giant?

It turns out that AT&T is so woke its executives are asleep at the wheel.

Congressional investigations are surely coming, as are a growing number of boycotts, etc., that could really have an impact.

In a nutshell, the world’s largest telecommunications company (and third largest provider of cell phones) has insidiously morphed into a far-left organization that poses as a service company.

According to OpenSecrets, during the time period between 1989 and 2019, AT&T was the fourteenth-largest donor to United States federal political campaigns and committees, contributing tens of millions of dollars, a majority of which went straight into Democrat hands.

As Newsmax contributor Jeffrey Lord reported in the American Spectator, the company’s leaders have backgrounds that link them with politicians of the liberal Democrat kind.

AT&T’s board of directors includes a chairman of the board that previously served as FCC chair, and was appointed by former President Bill Clinton. This same chairman of the board was an ambassador that was appointed to the position by former President Barack Obama.

Two board members are reliable contributors to prominent Democratic candidates, including one individual who was an advisor and supporter of former President Bill Clinton, as well as being the co-chair of the left-leaning Brookings Institution.

One board member was an appointee to President Obama’s “President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.”

Another board member was a former President of the Ford Foundation, an outfit that donated millions of dollars to an anti-Trump organization.

AT&T’s board is extremely suspect when it comes to decisions concerning conservative political expression, as Lord wrote in his conclusion:

“Board of Directors of AT&T that is stacked with like-minded far Left extremists who cannot abide conservatives or political dissent.”

And what about AT&T’s top management position?

According to City Journal’s Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, AT&T’s CEO John Stankey launched a radical re-education program in 2020 for his employees, which promoted the following racially tinged idea: “American racism is a uniquely white trait.”

The CEO’s program also pushed left-wing concepts such as “reparations,” “defunding of police” and “trans activism.”

The training essentially massages the minds of white employees into believing that they “are the problem.”

The line of reasoning is based on core principles of critical race theory that include “systemic racism,” “white privilege” and “white fragility.”

So the person at the helm of the telecommunications company is pushing an agenda that could have been crafted by Saul Alinsky?

As Lord observed, “AT&T has been changed from a politically neutral communications company to a woke, far left censor which has charged itself with an obsessive mission of silencing conservatives — Newsmax in this case, and One America News before that.”

AT&T doesn’t exactly have a track record that inspires trust.

–In January of 2006 The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class action lawsuit, alleging that the company had allowed a government intelligence agency to monitor, without warrants, phone and Internet communications of its customers.

–In May of 2006, USA Today reported that all of AT&T’s international and domestic calling records had been handed over to a government intelligence agency for the purpose of creating a massive calling database.

–In June of 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that AT&T had rewritten rules on its privacy policy so that “AT&T – not customers – owns customers’ confidential info and can use it ‘to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.’”

–In July of 2006, a federal district court rejected a federal government motion to dismiss EFF’s case. After the case had been appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appellate court dismissed it in June of 2009.

–In August of 2007, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell confirmed that AT&T was one of the telecommunications companies that assisted with the government’s warrantless wire-tapping program on calls between foreign and domestic sources.

AT&T’s DirecTV pays cable license fees to all 22 left-leaning news channels that it carries, despite the fact that most of the channels have far lower ratings than Newsmax.

Additionally, leftist organizations have exerted pressure on the already woke company to actually get rid of conservative programming.

New York Magazine in January 2022 reported the following: “In recent months, several organizations, including the NAACP and Media Matters for America, had been pressuring AT&T and DirecTV to dump OAN for promoting false information…”

Added to those lobbying the telecommunication company to deplatform Newsmax and other conservative media outlets are Democrats in Congress, who sit on a committee that is charged with regulating AT&T.

Did corporate heads at AT&T via its DirecTV subsidiary set out to suppress the speech of Newsmax? And was the company following the dictates of its fellow left-leaning politicians, media apparatchiks and radical activist groups?

The pieces of the puzzle seem to be falling into place.

Meaningful steps can be taken to let AT&T know that it doesn’t get to rewrite the Constitution.

–Cancel DirecTV by calling 877-763-9762.

–Cancel AT&T by calling 888-855-2338.

–Call congressional representatives and senators at 202-224-3121.

–Sign the online petition at IwantNewsmax.com

–Spread the word.

Freedom of speech hangs in the balance.

Back to the Future for the AT&T-Time Warner Merger

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U.S. District Judge Richard Leon recently greenlighted the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger, while failing to impose any conditions or restrictions upon the massive media consolidation.

The merger, about which reports have circulated since late 2016, was publicly opposed by President Donald Trump as well as by the Department of Justice, which in the fall of 2017 went to court to stop the transaction.

After a six-week trial, Judge Leon ruled that the merger could move ahead, belittling the government’s legal arguments.

In an unusual expression for a jurist, Leon, who also presided over the Comcast-NBC-U mega-merger in 2011, went so far as to urge the government not to appeal the decision.

Antitrust law exists to prevent monopolies that could potentially stifle competition and harm consumers. When the same company owns the means of media production as well as the means of distribution of media content, antitrust issues arise.

This is not the first time that media companies have been met with legal challenges over simultaneous ownership of content and the means by which the content is delivered. In the 1940s, Hollywood studios produced motion pictures while owning the theaters in which the very films were being displayed.

In a 1948 decision, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that Hollywood studios would be required to sell off movie theater holdings.

The landmark decision essentially ended the studio system of the “Golden Age” of movies, while fundamentally altering the way in which Hollywood movies were produced, distributed, and exhibited. It also fostered the idea that “vertical integration” should be restrained by courts and, based on antitrust principles, barriers should be put in place between corporate ownership of both distribution and content.

With regard to the AT&T-Time Warner merger, the Trump administration had argued that the resulting conglomerate would create the same vertical integration-dual ownership issue that the old Hollywood studio system faced, and as a negative consequence consumers would end up paying more for their television viewing.

This was the same position with regard to the proposed merger that then-candidate Trump held during the 2016 presidential campaign.

In addition to potential risk to consumers’ pocketbooks, the entertainment business will be significantly affected by the AT&T-Time Warner combination. Allowing the merger to proceed in its present fashion will have profound ramifications for the manner in which entertainment companies compete with one other.

Owners of news, movie, and/or entertainment cable television channels, who wish to be well placed on the AT&T-Time Warner system, will be beholden to a company that has control over the delivery system while simultaneously owning competing channels.

Producers of content that competes with that of AT&T-Time Warner may need to have the content distributed via the merged company’s delivery system.

It is certainly within the realm of possibility that the merged company would advertently or even inadvertently favor channels and content which the enterprise owns.

The court’s decision in approving the merger may also embolden other Hollywood studios to pair up with telecommunications companies in order to effectively deal with the cash-rich tech companies that have invaded the entertainment space of late, e.g., Apple, Amazon, Google, and Netflix.

One relevant case in point is that of Comcast, which has jumped into the bidding for 21st Century Fox’s assets that Disney had already been in the process of negotiating to purchase.

Consumers generally have very few options when it comes to cable, satellite, and broadband services. AT&T provides broadband and television via a cable media delivery service, U-verse. It also owns a major satellite television provider, DirecTV.

By acquiring Time Warner, the company obtains a major movie and television studio, which includes the DC Comics’ franchises, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, along with television programming on TBS, TNT, CNN, and HBO.

By owning content and delivery, the newly merged company has the same kind of vertical integration that the Court broke up years ago, when it forced movie studios to divest in the Paramount case.