Opinion by
Erik Wemple
Media critic
April 20, 2021 at 12:06 p.m. CDT
News organizations survive on input from newsmakers. Gathering quotes, documents, tips and so on is their job.
So any group calling itself a news outlet is in a bind when one of its people speaks out in the media — as when a One America News producer named Marty Golingan gave an interview for a New York Times story about his outlet’s continued pro-Trump tilt. In the piece by Rachel Abrams, Golingan described his unease when he saw someone in the “Capitol mob” carrying a flag with the OAN logo. “I was like, okay, that’s not good,” he said. “That’s what happens when people listen to us.”
OAN’s response? Fire him.
Golingan’s situation points to an apparent crisis of conscience in the ranks at OAN, whose San Diego headquarters employs about 150 people. Many of his colleagues, Golingan said, didn’t believe the channel’s coverage of Joe Biden’s victory in the Nov. 3 election. “The majority of people did not believe the voter fraud claims being run on the air,” he told the Times. Even months after Biden’s win, notes Abrams, OAN continues promoting the fiction that there were “doubts” about the winner of the presidential contest.
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In an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog, Golingan, 35, said he went on record with the Times because his life was at a crossroads. At the time Abrams contacted him, he’d just been planning to resume his education — he has an associate’s degree in digital broadcasting. “I looked at the outreach as an opportunity to tell my side of the story and not just go out like everybody else, just resigning,” says Golingan, who worked at OAN for more than four years and says it was well understood that those who spoke with the media would be dismissed. “I just ran with it.”
Pay and benefits at OAN were solid, says Golingan, who worried that he couldn’t get hired at another news outlet. “It’s tough to leave a place that buys off your silence,” he says.
When it came to Abrams’s story, OAN did more than just try to keep its own employees silent. In March, the channel attempted to mobilize its audience against her in a segment in which an anchor said, “One America News is yet again coming under attack by the hate-filled liberal left. It has been brought to our attention that New York Times reporter Rachel Abrams has been harassing current and former OAN employees.” The reporter’s cellphone number was included in the report. The Times responded with a statement saying journalists should be “allowed to do their jobs without harassment” and pledging to plow ahead with the story.
But OAN may have problems bigger than an employee willing to go on record. Back in December, attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems sent a document-preservation demand as well as a second retraction demand to OAN in connection with statements made on its programs about the alleged role of the company’s voting machines in the non-theft of the presidential election. Dominion and Smartmatic have already filed suit against Fox News over coverage with similar insinuations. (You can read Fox News’s motion to dismiss Smartmatic’s suit here.)
Staffers at mainstream news organizations are playing an increasingly muscular role in holding their bosses to account. Examples include the Times, where journalists revolted over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in June 2020; The Post, where the newsroom objected to discipline imposed on reporter Felicia Sonmez for tweeting a story following the death of Kobe Bryant; and Slate, where staffers pressed their superiors over the conduct of podcast host Mike Pesca.
More of that activity is needed in conservative media — not only at OAN but also at Fox News, where employees have voiced their gripes on the condition of anonymity. As recent years have shown, there’s money to be made in producing pro-Trump propaganda, but the task gets a bit more difficult if staffers won’t help disperse the lies and disinformation.
