One America News, which is especially reviled by the rest of the press for its pro-Trump news coverage, is now the target of fake news from the fevered minds at left-wing Vanity Fair.

According to the Washington Examiner:

One America News Network is demanding an apology and a retraction from Vanity Fair days after it published an article that said a group with ties to Donald Trump Jr. purchased a large stake in the cable news outlet.

A piece by Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman published on Monday said "the Dallas-based Hicks family has acquired a major stake" in OAN and it was "aligned" with the president's eldest son. Both Trump Jr. and OAN have pushed back on the story.

OAN President Charles Herring sent a letter to Sherman and Roger Lynch, the CEO of Conde Nast, Vanity Fair's parent company, demanding a retraction and an apology. He also threatened litigation.

See, a pro-Trump network couldn't possibly exist without someone aligned with the Trump family paying for it.  There's no such thing as maybe viewers wanting this kind of news and investors who are invested in the operation doing their investments because it's profitable.  No one could watch a pro-Trump network unless it were somehow being propped up, the logic goes.  And the only reason OAN could possibly exist in the minds of the Vanity Fair set would be if Trump were one way or another paying for it.  The motive would be to displace Fox News by pouring money into its rival.  So no need to fact-check any of the facts of the matter; just throw it out there that the Trump family and its allies must be looking to make money off OAN.

I wouldn't have a big problem if Don Trump, Jr. or his friends in Dallas did invest in the network.  It's obviously a popular and growing outlet, providing the kind of coverage some parts of the market want.

But facts matter, and Trump Jr. says he's not invested in it, and neither are his Dallas allies.  OAN says it's taking no outside investors, which often is a sign of a company that is happy with its profits and doesn't want to share.

The Vanity Fair report, as it happens, uses anonymous sources for its claims: 

"[RNC co-chair] Tommy Hicks and Don Jr. have been looking to buy a station for Trump TV," said one source briefed on the talks. "This is all about building a Fox competitor. Trump is really aiming to take down Fox," the person briefed on the deal told me. 

This is kind of ridiculous.  Trump, who's at the top of this food chain, would presumably be ordering the purchase to boost his poll numbers and get a friendly version of the news, as if he wasn't already getting just that from OAN as it is.  But as election 2016 demonstrated, solidly negative and biased news coverage from the mainstream media is no barrier for Trump to get elected president, and for many voters, it's actually the reason why they voted for the man.  So it doesn't make that much sense to argue that Trump Jr. wants to buy a press of his own.

This Vanity Fair report continues the constant drumbeat of fake-news claims that the Trump family must be profiting from public office and buying itself a press (someone should ask Democrat Mike Bloomberg about that), since it can't get good coverage otherwise, and the whole thing is galling.

It's good to see that OAN is demanding an apology for this sort of fake news in lieu of money — which signals that this isn't about money for them.  It's about basic media standards.  Vanity Fair is a supposed pillar of respectability in the media establishment, and here it goes making up stuff that those accused say isn't true.  They won't apologize, because they do this stuff all the time.  Maybe they should be forced to shell out.  Making up stuff to Get Trump shouldn't be the standard.

Caricature by DonkeyHotey via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.