Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
The upstart conservative network One America News is trying to build a business model as a Fox News alternative. Publicly, that means begging President Donald Trump to tune in. But behind the scenes, someone is spending decent sums of money to convince boomers to “make the switch.”
A pair of Facebook pages have popped up in recent weeks that exist for no reason but to encourage older Americans on the platform to drop Fox in favor of OANN. The pages, titled “Informative Tips for the Community” and “American Voices Today,” have together spent more than $70,000 since last month on Facebook ads pressing for Fox viewers to tune into OANN instead. All of the ads target people over the age of 55.