Conservative media Benedict Arnold and former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy threw a weapons-grade hissy fit Wednesday night at his newsletter site Status over YouTube TV striking a carriage agreement with our friends at One America News Network (OANN), declaring it a “deal with the devil” and incomprehensible they’d “breath[e] life into a network that has trafficked in lies and conspiracies for years.”
Worse yet, Darcy determined the real villain in the coverage of the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting was conservative media and the victims are transgender people with the former “vilifying the vulnerable” and “weaponiz[ing]” the hateful transgender shooter “into an indictment of an entire community.”
Going first to OANN, Darcy’s headline implied something deeply troubling as though the Google-owned company had engaged in nefarious activity: “YouTube’s Deal With the Devil; Google once declared OAN too toxic for its platform—now Sundar Pichai and Neal Mohan are breathing new life into the conspiracy network as they negotiate a high-stakes agreement with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation.”
Darcy wistfully harkened back to 2020 when the website had “suspended the right-wing conspiracy factory...demonetized its channel, and declared that it was not an ‘authoritative’ source.” He said this “was the correct call” because “OAN has a lengthy record of spewing dangerous lies” and thus YouTube chose to lean into its “responsibility to protect its users from corrosive disinformation.”
“Now, less than five years later, Google boss Sundar Pichai and YouTube chief Neal Mohan have executed a shameless, whiplash-inducing reversal...In effect, Google tossed a lifeline to the outlet, since most every other major carrier in the country had booted it from its lineup,” he fretted in describing the deal.
The censorship tyrant threw a childish fit that “Google cav[ed]” because “Donald Trump is back in the White House” and “has conditioned corporate America to bend the knee,” so Google did this as “a political olive branch to the autocratic wannabe[.]”
After a detour into Fox’s carriage dispute with YouTube TV, Darcy linked the two together in a conclusion that wasn’t surprising given his previous demands DirecTV remove OAN, Newsmax, and Fox News because Americans shouldn’t be allowed to hear opinions he doesn’t like:
By handing the conspiracy network a distribution deal, Google has armed itself with a convenient talking point: proof, it can argue, that it is not discriminating against MAGA viewpoints as it haggles with Murdoch.
But that shield comes at a steep cost. In exchange for short-term political cover, Pichai and Mohan have laid bare that YouTube’s content decisions are driven not by principle, but by the politics of the moment. The result: breathing life into a network that has trafficked in lies and conspiracies for years, and granting legitimacy to the propaganda outlet YouTube once rightly judged too toxic to monetize, let alone carry.
As for his toxic take about the deadly massacre in Minnesota, Darcy declared in the headline for this section of the newsletter:
Vilifying the Vulnerable: “AGAIN: TRANS SHOOTS UP MINNEAPOLIS CATHOLIC SCHOOL.” That was the banner splashed across Breitbart’s homepage Wednesday evening, a reflection of the anti-trans narrative flowing through right-wing media after a shooter opened fire on Catholic school children during mass.
Darcy would clinging to every detail and making commentaries about the broader, odious state of conservative media if the coward had been a Trump supporter, but because it’s someone with hateful views seen on the fringes of the left, he’s deemed it inappropriate to expand further:
Much of the coverage was fixated on the shooter’s gender identity, casting trans people as inherently dangerous. Indeed, the goal seemed to be to take the suspect's heinous actions and weaponize them into an indictment of an entire community. Elon Musk, the father of a transgender daughter, also piled on, declaring “there is a clear pattern here.”
Of course, he cheered Minneapolis Democrat Mayor Jacob Frey for “push[ing] back directly at that framing,” citing comments at a press conference Wednesday that anyone “villaniz[ing] our trans community” lacks a “sense of common humanity.”
