Tag: Newsmax

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.

What’s Behind DirecTV’s Censorship of Newsmax?

DirecTV just recently removed Newsmax from its channel lineup.

It was less than a year ago that the AT&T-owned media outlet deplatformed One America News (OAN), another digital news source that offers folks a more balanced option to the far-left fare that overwhelmingly dominates the current media ethersphere.

The selective decision by corporate heads appears to have been highly politically motivated, since a host of channels that are filled with radical-left programming are still readily available to DirecTV users, even though viewing audiences remain in short supply.

Newsmax, on the other hand, ranks as the fourth highest-rated cable news channel in the nation. But now the more than 15 million customers of DirecTV, DirecTV Stream, and U-Verse are no longer able to access Newsmax’s alternative to the knee-jerk liberal content that appears on almost all of the other news and information channels.

One of the outlets with an extreme left-wing agenda that is allowed to freely prattle on is Vice Media. The channel is a virtual promoter of the trademark liberal political violence that has been witnessed over the past several years. Not only does Vice Media get to remain on the platform, it turns out that it is being subsidized financially by a managing owner of DirecTV.

Newsmax has experienced tremendous growth precisely because it continues to deliver to audiences the content that they seek; content largely denied to them elsewhere. Comprehensive coverage of national and international news, governmental operations, legal procedures and rulings, federal, state and local politics, etc., are on the daily docket.

With this latest move, DirecTV is essentially stifling speech that counters the Democratic Party’s carefully crafted and disseminated narrative.

Could it have anything to do with the looming 2024 presidential election? You be the judge.

Republican congressional members are rightly indignant about DirecTV’s decision. Many are publicly condemning the unprecedented move.

In light of the recent Twitter file revelations that point to probable collusion between government and technology platforms, it seems as though the perfect opportunity has presented itself for the new GOP-controlled House to investigate the origins of DirecTV’s decision to engage in what appears to be blatant ideological discrimination.

House committees may be taking a closer look at an entity called TPG Capital. This is a private equity fund that reportedly owns a 30% stake in DirecTV and also appears to oversee the cable company’s operations.

A few more details. TPG Capital is the private equity arm of the global asset firm TPG, which has fully adopted a woke-oriented agenda referred to in the business world as Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG).

ESG is a sort of measuring tool to gauge whether or not business organizations are sufficiently onboard with the woke agenda in order to qualify for financing and other advantages that equity firms provide.

On its website, TPG boasts about its ESG bona fides:

“TPG first adopted a Global ESG Performance Policy in 2012 and became a signatory to the UN Principles of Responsible Investment in 2013. Each year, we continue to strengthen and deepen the integration of ESG performance throughout the firm.”

While AT&T owns 70% of DirecTV, the telecommunications company had earlier sold a 30% stake to TPG.

AT&T named TPG as DirecTV’s operational manager. Under the terms of the transaction, the current DirecTV is governed by a board with two representatives from AT&T, two from TPG, and an additional fifth seat designated for the CEO.

The politics of those at the top rung of TPG are of the ultra-liberal kind. TPG’s executives have given Democratic candidates 90% of their political donations. The private equity firm has also subsidized the aforementioned far-left news network Vice Media to the tune of hundreds of millions.

The TPG partners that have been appointed to the DirecTV board are David Trujillo and John Flynn. Trujillo is a source of funds for Democrat politicians that include former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.

Interestingly, prior to the time OAN was jettisoned from DirecTV, Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee had admonished the cable carrier for the “spread of dangerous misinformation.”

Representatives Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., and Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., had written letters to a dozen cable, satellite and streaming video companies, including DirecTV, demanding without evidence that the content providers give an explanation as to why they were allowing Newsmax, OAN and Fox to remain on their platforms, accusing the media companies of “disseminating misinformation to millions” of users.

“Misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices…,” the representatives wrote, singling out Newsmax, OAN and Fox.

With two out of three outlets on the list going down, Congress needs to act fast to rescue free speech from the clutches of the stealth partners in the censorship battle.