from the whoops-I-did-a-truth dept
We’ve long written about One America News (OAN), the right wing propaganda mill pretending to be cable news journalism. The “news” outlet, originally funded and proposed by AT&T, traffics in no limit of dangerous conspiracy theories and authoritarian fan fiction, ranging from fake election conspiracies to the false claim that COVID was created in a North Carolina lab.
OAN “reporters” relentlessly kiss Donald Trump’s ass like dutiful stenographers. But OAN’s Gabrielle Cuccia, assigned by the network to pretend to seriously cover the Pentagon, has apparently paid the price for wandering a little too close to the truth.
Cuccia’s work at the network has consisted of fearmongering about immigration and taking fascists like Sebastian Gorka seriously. She recently posted a fairly unremarkable Substack post.
It spends a thousand words or so kissing Trump’s ass before eventually getting around to some light criticism of the Pentagon’s ongoing hostility to journalists, which has included banning reporters from large, non-secure parts of the Pentagon and assigning them goonish handlers:
“This marks a troubling shift in how the Department of Defense engages with the press and, by extension, the American public.
The Pentagon Press Association (although I am not officially part of the association —again hello I am MAGA) has raised valid concerns over the new restrictions on the movement of credentialed journalists within the Pentagon, even in non-secure, unclassified hallways.”
Hesgeth, himself a former fake journalist who failed upward into his completely unqualified role as Secretary of Defense, has launched a new harmful assault on real journalism to cover up the fact his short tenure has been potholed by a steady stream of staffer leaks and historically problematic security fuck ups. Screw ups which Cuccia’s broader post, of course, dutifully downplays.
Unfortunately for Cuccia, being too honest about Hesgeth’s assault on the First Amendment was apparently enough to get her booted from the Pentagon and fired from OAN, according to the Associated Press:
“Three days after her Memorial Day Substack post, Cuccia said her Pentagon access badge was revoked. “By Friday,” she said, “I was out of a job.”
The AP frames this as an almost-serious news organization firing a reporter because she expressed a human opinion in her off hours:
“Traditionally, the legacy media does not want its journalists expressing opinions about people they cover, since it calls into doubt their ability to report without bias. But exceptions are often made in cases where media access is at issue, said Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.”
The belief that reporters can’t express human, personal opinions in their free time without harming the credibility of their employer is something many major news outlets still adhere to as a form of performative ethics (recall the AP fired promising young journalist Emily Wilder because she did some light activism in college and wrote a few tweets sympathetic to Palestinians).
That’s of course gibberish. One because it implies OAN is real journalism. And two, because real outlets that enforce these types of restrictions will usually turn around and publish fifty stories in a row credulously parroting the strange claims of law enforcement, lobbyists, or CEOs without batting an eyelash. Or turn their websites into glorified blogspam affiliates for Amazon.com several times a year.
In this case, Cuccia was clearly fired for not towing the authoritarian line, which is OAN’s entire purpose. The firing is particularly ironic coming from the same Republican party that insists that any cable or satellite TV company that refuses to carry OAN (it genuinely doesn’t have that many viewers) is engaged in an act of overt, unfair censorship.
When DirecTV refused to carry OAN because the network wasn’t profitable for them, you might recall it was such a crisis that six Republican AGs felt the need to whine publicly about unfair “censorship,” and make vague threats against DirecTV for the crime of… making their own choices. But an OAN employee gets shitcanned for stumbling accidentally into the truth in her free time, and it’s crickets.
Again because Trump Republicans, shockingly enough, don’t actually care about free speech. They care about parroting, protecting, and perpetuating authoritarian bullshit.
Filed Under: defense department, donald trump, free speech, gabrielle cuccia, journalism, media, pentagon, propaganda, transparency
Companies: at&t, one america news
