Who Owns OANN? All About the Conservative News Network

One America News Network or OANN is a popular news source for conservatives in the U.S. The network has received more attention with the current presidential election for its support of President Trump. 

The news outlet is owned by one family that shares its conservative views. The family owns more than just One America News. In fact, the family owns another channel that isn't so politically focused.  

According to the OANN website, the network is owned by Herring Networks, Inc., which is owned by the Herring Family. The network was founded in 2013 and is owned by Robert Herring. Charles Herring, Robert's son, is the president of Herring Broadcasting, which is a branch of Herring Networks that runs OANN.

Robert Herring said he started working on OANN because of late nights with no sleep. The Washington Post called him an insomniac. Because he couldn't sleep, he would stay up watching the news and later decided to join the profession himself. 

Born in 1941, Herring is more of a businessman than a journalist. In 2000, he earned $122 million by selling his family's circuit board printing business, Herco Technology. Then, Herring started to shift his attention to TV. 

One America Network is the Herring Family's second channel. The first, A Wealth of Entertainment (AWE) was founded in 2004 as Wealth TV. However, OANN is the family's first and only news media venture.

"We looked at MSNBC and Fox and I kept thinking that Rachel Maddow and Bill O’Reilly had the same format — one person spending an hour beating three or four subjects to death," Charles Herring told The Washington Post.

"CNN was moving in the same direction, away from hard news. There was a lane for us to hit the news down the center and lean right.”

While Fox News is considered a mainstream competitor to One America, Newsmax is another conservative news outlet that has been gaining attention. Recently, President Trump retweeted support for Newsmax and denounced Fox. As a result, Fox stock fell almost six percent.

Both OANN and Newsmax denied Biden's win in the presidential election, while Fox News called it along with more liberal news sources. CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter said that Newsmax has seen a big uptick in ratings since the election. Google searches for the news outlet have also increased.

In a post published on Nov. 10, OANN links Dominion Voting Systems back to Hillary Clinton. Dominion is one of the main systems used in U.S. elections. OAN said that "glitches" could have swayed this year's presidential election in Biden's favor. 

"Several issues arose during that time, including technical 'glitches' with the election software used in 69 of the states 83 counties," the post said after mentioning Trump's campaign lawsuit against Michigan for not allowing their poll workers to adequately monitor the ballot counting process.

To calculate its ratings, OANN says that it relies on a custom Comscore, which spans 70 markets in the U.S. "We have been working with Comscore since 2009 and believe its data is the most accurate in our industry, as it uses set-top box data, not sampling," OANN's website states. 

The website says that as of March 2019, One America Network is fourth in networks labeled as "Cable, News/ Business/ Info networks." One America Network doesn't participate in Nielsen Media Research for its TV ratings, which is a much larger-scale operation.