Republicans in Congress are calling for investigations after DirecTV dumped Newsmax. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Republicans in Congress are calling for investigations after DirecTV dumped Newsmax. I think you and I will agree on this. I hope we do, we haven’t talked about this. Newsmax, Newsmax is a hack organization. No question. The thing that bothers me, where have we gotten that we can’t allow just this free speech? Where have we gotten to where, look, if you watch Newsmax in 10 minutes, you can see I know what they’re about and if it doesn’t fit, change the station. But to have DirecTV because the government, the government asked them to do this, you understand this is, they didn’t just do this on their own. They did this under heavy pressure from the government. It’s nothing but governmental censorship.
Farron Cousins: See, I take it a different approach. I look at it for, if you look at it from the business standpoint, what happened here, according to AT&T, and I do think, and I’ve said this, AT&T should release the negotiations, the documents.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Let’s see who’s telling the truth here. But AT&T says, listen, we gave Newsmax a sweetheart deal back in 2012 to join our lineup. We basically created them. So now it’s time to renew the contract and they want us to pay them all of this money, which we’d probably do except for the fact Newsmax puts, Newsmax puts all of their content out there on the internet for free. 100% of it.
Mike Papantonio: Wow. Okay.
Farron Cousins: So why would we have to pay you for this when you’re already, you know, why buy the cow when you’re getting the milk for free?
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: But then too, on the issue of, oh, were they pressured to do this? Three days after this happened, they had a new right wing news organization that took that same spot and its one featuring had the headliner Bill O’Reilly.
Mike Papantonio: Okay, well, great. Look.
Farron Cousins: So there is, there is a new.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Thanks for that info. I, I literal.
Farron Cousins: That story got totally overlooked.
Mike Papantonio: I did not know that part of the story. I’m encouraged by that because not, not that it’s Bill O’Reilly. I used to go on Bill O’Reilly. We’d be clash, you know, but the point is, you get it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, you can’t, you can’t have government or you can’t have industry censoring anything unless it’s just so untoward that you just say, we can’t allow for it. That’s good news to me. Thank you. Thank you for correcting me on that.
Farron Cousins: Well, no problem. But I, like I said, if DirecTV is saying one thing, Newsmax is saying another, there’s emails, there’s documents, somebody put them out there. At least let us know who’s telling the truth and who’s not.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Because if DirecTV is lying, then you do have a problem. But if DirecTV is right that, oh, they wanted exorbitant sums of money when they’re giving it away for free, then there’s no point in it. We’ll just go to this new fledgling network, which is what AT&T, DirecTV did with One America as well. You know, they got dropped last year, but AT&T had given them millions of dollars to start up.
Mike Papantonio: Well, it, it does look bad on its surface.
Farron Cousins: Oh, sure it does.
Mike Papantonio: Unless you know the facts that you just told us, it looks bad. And I’m glad you told me that. I did not know those facts. Thank you for that.
