AT&T All in on Woke Agenda

AT&T and its subsidiary DirecTV recently dropped Newsmax from its lineup, while leaving in place 22 liberal news channels.

The subsidiary canceled the fourth highest-rated news channel, which left 25 million cable viewers scrambling to get their preferred channel from a different source.

DirecTV’s parent company doesn’t appear to be operating under any kind of conventional business model. The blatant ideological discrimination begs the question: Just how woke is the telecommunications giant?

It turns out that AT&T is so woke its executives are asleep at the wheel.

Congressional investigations are surely coming, as are a growing number of boycotts, etc., that could really have an impact.

In a nutshell, the world's largest telecommunications company (and third largest provider of cellphones) has insidiously morphed into a far-left organization that poses as a service company.

According to OpenSecrets, during the time period between 1989 and 2019, AT&T was the 14th-largest donor to United States federal political campaigns and committees, contributing tens of millions of dollars, a majority of which went straight into Democrat hands.

As Newsmax contributor Jeffrey Lord reported in the American Spectator, the company's leaders have backgrounds that link them with politicians of the liberal Democrat kind.

AT&T’s board of directors includes a chairman of the board that previously served as FCC chair, and was appointed by former President Bill Clinton. This same chairman of the board was an ambassador that was appointed to the position by former President Barack Obama.

Two board members are reliable contributors to prominent Democratic candidates, including one individual who was an adviser and supporter of former President Bill Clinton, as well as being the co-chair of the left-leaning Brookings Institution.

One board member was an appointee to President Obama’s “President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.”

Another board member was a former President of the Ford Foundation, an outfit that donated millions of dollars to an anti-Trump organization.

AT&T's board is extremely suspect when it comes to decisions concerning conservative political expression, as Lord wrote in his conclusion:

“Board of Directors of AT&T that is stacked with like-minded far Left extremists who cannot abide conservatives or political dissent.”

And what about AT&T's top management position?

According to City Journal’s Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, AT&T's CEO John Stankey launched a radical re-education program in 2020 for his employees, which promoted the following racially tinged idea: “American racism is a uniquely white trait.”

The CEO’s program also pushed left-wing concepts such as “reparations,” “defunding of police” and “trans activism.”

The training essentially massages the minds of white employees into believing that they “are the problem.”

The line of reasoning is based on core principles of critical race theory that include “systemic racism,” “white privilege” and “white fragility.”

So the person at the helm of the telecommunications company is pushing an agenda that could have been crafted by Saul Alinsky?

As Lord observed, “AT&T has been changed from a politically neutral communications company to a woke, far left censor which has charged itself with an obsessive mission of silencing conservatives — Newsmax in this case, and One America News before that.”

AT&T doesn’t exactly have a track record that inspires trust.

• In January of 2006 The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class action lawsuit, alleging that the company had allowed a government intelligence agency to monitor, without warrants, phone and internet communications of its customers.
• In May of 2006, USA Today reported that all of AT&T's international and domestic calling records had been handed over to a government intelligence agency for the purpose of creating a massive calling database.
• In June of 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that AT&T had rewritten rules on its privacy policy so that “AT&T – not customers – owns customers' confidential info and can use it 'to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.'”
• In July of 2006, a federal district court rejected a federal government motion to dismiss EFF's case. After the case had been appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appellate court dismissed it in June of 2009.
• In August of 2007, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell confirmed that AT&T was one of the telecommunications companies that assisted with the government's warrantless wiretapping program on calls between foreign and domestic sources.

AT&T's DirecTV pays cable license fees to all 22 left-leaning news channels that it carries, despite the fact that most of the channels have far lower ratings than Newsmax.

Additionally, leftist organizations have exerted pressure on the already woke company to actually get rid of conservative programming.

New York Magazine in January 2022 reported the following: “In recent months, several organizations, including the NAACP and Media Matters for America, had been pressuring AT&T and DirecTV to dump OAN for promoting false information ...”

Added to those lobbying the telecommunication company to deplatform Newsmax and other conservative media outlets are Democrats in Congress, who sit on a committee that is charged with regulating AT&T.

Did corporate heads at AT&T via its DirecTV subsidiary set out to suppress the speech of Newsmax? And was the company following the dictates of its fellow left-leaning politicians, media apparatchiks and radical activist groups?

The pieces of the puzzle seem to be falling into place.

Meaningful steps can be taken to let AT&T know that it doesn’t get to rewrite the Constitution.

• Cancel DirecTV by calling 877-763-9762.
• Cancel AT&T by calling 888-855-2338.
• Call congressional representatives and senators at 202-224-3121.
• Sign the online petition at IwantNewsmax.com
• Spread the word.

Freedom of speech hangs in the balance.

James Hirsen, J.D., M.A., in media psychology, is a New York Times best-selling author, media analyst, and law professor. Visit Newsmax TV Hollywood. Read James Hirsen's Reports — More Here.