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Inside the Deep, Dark Roku Underworld

Featuring Terrorists, Conspiracy Nuts,
and Bill O’Reilly
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty

The digital streaming device’s easy-to-access private channels are a dark place filled
with some of the worst of humanity.
Tarpley Hitt
Reporter

Published Aug. 22, 2020 5:04AM ET

I
f the streaming wars reinvented network television,
the digital streaming device Roku amounts to
something like basic cable. Through purple software
packaged in a set-top box or smart TV, Roku peddles
a discount option for the average viewer, bundling a
limited range of shows and movies on what they call
The Roku Channel. For a wider selection, users can consult the
Channel Store, an App Store-esque glut of paid, free, and amateur
offerings. It’s a popular set-up. As of June, some 43 million
households had an active Roku account—millions more than the
population of California.

Scrolling through the Roku Channel Store is the TV viewer’s

answer to crate-digging: thousands of titles, many of them
familiar, multiple copies of Jerry McGuire, and a sprawling
collection of obscure odds and ends, detritus from the over-
productive arm of the American entertainment industry. A recent
trip through its 3,000-odd selections turned up a military tactical
guide called Warrior Poet Society Network, a Lego toy review
channel 111LegoNetwork111, a collection of aquatic screensavers
called Reef Diving Backgrounds, two separate shrines to the 1950s
crime show Racket Squad, and a tween program called 911 Gurls’
Topics, whose series include “Do It Gurl,” Do It Gurl Season 2,”
“See Gurl Try,” and “What’s Up With Haley?”

Roku’s low bar for entry, however, has also made it a home for
content unwelcome on other streaming services. Earlier this
month, Gizmodo reported on three Roku channels—Peeps TV,
Pride Outdoor Network, and Sabbath School TV—that promote
anti-vaxx quack science and misinformation about the global
pandemic, including the viral conspiracy video Plandemic, and its
equally debunked sequel Indoctornation 2.

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A Daily Beast review of Roku’s store found at least a dozen other

channels making similar claims, violating their content restrictions
on “false, irrelevant, or misleading information.” Last year, for
example, Roku publicly banned InfoWars, the Alex Jones-run
conspiracy network known for calling the Sandy Hook school
shooting a hoax. Jones’ coverage, however, is still readily available
on the Roku channels Texas Liberty Radio and FreeJackTV. (Roku
did not respond to multiple requests for comment).

Elsewhere, a channel called Free or Die TV offers programming on

the debunked ties between vaccinations and autism. The same
developer put out Truth Files TV, which invites viewers to join
them “on an unabashed journey through nonsense and non-truths
and ultimately to truth and reality,” but pushes the same fake
science. Also on there: Truth in Media from Ben Swann, the
former reporter for Fox News and Russia Today who resigned after
promoting Pizzagate, another unfounded theory alleging the
Clintons ran a child-sex ring out of a D.C. pizza shop. The channel
UFOTV features movies like “Emerging Viruses and Vaccinations,”
pushing false claims about “man-made viruses” and the dangers of
vaccines. Similar ideas can be found on The Conspiracy Theory
Channel, Conspiracy Theory Channel, Zeitgeist Conspiracy
Channel, and an option popular in the White House: One America
News Network.

Officially called “Non-Certified Channels,”

these unregulated networks are not listed
in the Channel Store and ineligible for
assistance from Roku Support.
But viewers exhausted by the Roku Channel and Channel Store
have a third, lesser-known option: Roku’s private channels.
Officially called “Non-Certified Channels,” these unregulated
networks are not listed in the Channel Store and are ineligible for
assistance from Roku Support. But with an access code—all easy to
find online—viewers can add hidden programming from their
computer directly to their TV, with little oversight other than a
brief disclaimer:

THIS IS A NON-CERTIFIED CHANNEL. Roku requires all channels to

abide by Roku’s terms and conditions, and to distribute only legal
content. Roku does not test or review non-certified channels. You
acknowledge you are accessing a non-certified channel that may include
content that is offensive or inappropriate for some audiences.
Moreover, if Roku determines that this channel violates copyright,
contains illegal content, or otherwise violates Roku’s terms and
conditions, then ROKU MAY REMOVE THIS CHANNEL WITHOUT
PRIOR NOTICE, AND YOUR ACCOUNT MAY BE BLOCKED FROM
ADDING ANY OTHER NON-CERTIFIED CHANNELS.

Non-certified channels are ostensibly for beta-testing and focus

groups. But Roku’s Direct Publisher program makes it easy for
anyone to create a channel of their own. Tom Roth, the electrical
engineer who runs RokuGuide.com, an independent and
comprehensive channel catalogue, told The Daily Beast he made
one in an afternoon as a way to store vacation photos.

“You can sign up and create a free account,” he said, “If you want a
Roku [private] channel, you’re assigned a vanity code. You can use
it and then click the button to never publish it in the Channel
Store.”

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As a result, Roku’s back network of private channels heightens

both the weirdness and darkness of its public one. There are low-
budget performance art-type programs, like hungo-Vision—an
array of 70 videos from artist Butch Hungo, whose short film I
Walk Erect resembles something out of a Tim & Eric sketch.
There’s an archive from the 1997 Baltimore public access channel
Atomic TV that describes itself as “Best Worst TV, A Media Maxi-
Pad absorbing the continual flow of Pop Culture.” There’s a
channel dedicated to “Musical performances from Disney’s 2014
Night of Joy.”

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But mixed in with the lighter stuff are channels that didn’t meet
whatever opaque standards Roku upholds for its public store.
Viewers can add Al-Mayadeen, the pan-Arab station that functions
as a Hezbollah mouthpiece, whose director of programming once
argued that Bashar al-Assad was “subject to an international
conspiracy” over claims that his regime slaughtered Syrian
civilians. There’s also Church Militant, a Catholic-sect station
whose excommunicated founder, Michael Voris, has called to
impose Catholic monarchy and limit voting to “faithful” Catholics.
“The only way to run a country is by benevolent dictatorship,”
Voris once claimed, “who protects his people from themselves and
bestows on them what they need, not necessarily what they want."

After getting fired from FOX, Bill O’Reilly revived his career with a
private Roku channel called No Spin News, which recently went
public in June. And Accent Radio Network, a Rhode Island-based
radio show that shuttered when its founders were indicted by the
Feds in 2012 for selling fake cancer cures, has also come back on
with a private Roku channel. The afternoon I tuned in to one of
their shows, Daniel Chapter One, the host was praising South
Dakota for its unbothered COVID-19 response. “They didn’t shut
down,” he said. “And no face-diaper mandates in the state!”

Roth, who has run RokuGuide.com for a decade this September,

said that in recent years he’s seen fewer private programs—not
because Roku has begun regulating them, but because public ones
have gotten easier to make. “Roku has made it so easy to create a
channel, so we’re seeing fewer private [ones].” Roth said. “A lot of
the time, private channels become regular channels.”

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For the past few years, the story of conspiracy and fringe far-right
media has been one of displacement. Social media and streaming
platforms restrict misinformation; then, its pundits move
elsewhere—from YouTube, to Facebook, to a series of increasingly
obscure and badly named sites or apps (Gab, MeWe, Parler),
widening the gulf between research-based programs and hate-
filled or intentionally false ones. The end game of deplatforming is
to minimize influence—and, according to some research, it does. It
also effectively creates two kinds of markets, and Roku remains
among the few streaming services to permit both. “Our mission,”
the company’s About page reads, “is to be the TV streaming
platform that connects the entire TV ecosystem around the world.”

Tarpley Hitt
Reporter
Tarpley.Hitt@thedailybeast.com

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That Time I Published a Putin Pal’s ‘Deep

State’ Rant at The Daily Caller
‘JUST PROPAGANDA’
A former editor at the right-wing site recalls how he was made to publish an op-ed by
Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch whom the Senate this week tied to Russia’s election
scheming.
Eric Owens

Updated Aug. 22, 2020 !0:04AM ET / Published Aug. 22, 2020 5:0!AM ET

O
leg Deripaska is in the news again, as he
occasionally tends to be. Deripaska is a Russian
billionaire who is intimately tied to the Kremlin’s
corrupt and autocratic regime. Think of a villain in a
James Bond movie—a wealthy, impeccably dressed
and monstrous gangster with a huge yacht and an
annoying grin that Bond will surely address.

According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,

Deripaska has “acted as a proxy for the Russian state and
intelligence services” since at least 2004. Deripaska’s name
appears a whopping 340 times in the Senate report, not including
the vast multitude of parts that are censored for intelligence
reasons.

“Deripaska has managed and financed Kremlin-approved and -

directed active measures campaigns, including information
operations and election interference efforts.” He “conducts
influence operations” outside of Russia. He has worked tirelessly
“to install pro-Kremlin regimes” and—pay attention to this part
—“to control local economies and politicians” in nations all over
the world. And don’t kid yourself: Our government is most
definitely among the governments that Russia’s regime seeks to
control.

Paul Manafort, an imprisoned felon who was the chairman of

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, worked with
Deripaska through Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence
officer. (So we are clear: a Russian intelligence officer is a trained,
professional, paid spy.)

I’d like to regale you with a little story about the time I worked
with Deripaska. It’s truly a tempest in a teapot, but it illustrates a
much larger, more dangerous truth. Bear with me.

Back in 2018, I was the opinion editor for The Daily Caller. I had
worked for the website for about five years as a journalist and
editor. I really believed in what we were doing. I believed in what
founders Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel said they were building.
(More on that later.)

In early March 2018, Deripaska submitted an opinion piece to The

Daily Caller. He didn’t submit it directly to me or through the
Caller’s conventional submissions process. Presumably, villainous
Russian billionaires are above such hoi polloi procedures. Instead,
Daily Caller publisher Patel contacted me directly one day saying
he had received Deripaska’s op-ed. He wanted to know how I felt
about it.

I hated it. Anyone with a passing knowledge of European politics

would know who Deripaska is and what he represents. I had been
in the U.S. foreign service for a bit, so, of course, I knew.

More importantly, Deripaska’s op-ed itself was—and remains—an

extraordinary exercise in audacious Russian propaganda.

“The ever-changing ‘Russia narrative’ in American politics is

today’s Wag the Dog scenario,” Deripaska wrote (or, more likely,
had ghostwritten), citing the 1997 movie about a fake war starring
Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro.

Deripaska went on to weave a fantastic conspiracy theory which is

fundamentally at odds with the findings of the United States
Senate. He describes American foreign policy experts as “the ‘Deep
State,’” which, he claimed, is “shadow power exercised by a small
number of individuals from media, business, government and the
intelligence community, foisting provocative and cynically false
manipulations on the public.”

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The Russian billionaire complained that American foreign-policy

professionals have “scurrilously attacked” him “for two decades.”

After several paragraphs suggesting a host of strange conspiracies

fit for a late Stalin purge, Deripaska attempted to quote Abraham
Lincoln and then suggested that the U.S. foreign policy
establishment has “invented narratives” that “impede
internationally shared efforts on the world’s most pressing, real
issues.”

At the time, I told Patel I had deep reservations about publishing

Deripaska’s op-ed. I would reject it, I said. But Patel wanted to
publish the piece and so, of course, that’s what I did.

Naturally, people noticed. And noticed. And noticed some more.

All these people noticed for very good reason: In addition to

maintaining inseparable relationships with Russia’s autocrats and
 conducting influence operations for them, Deripaska is an alleged
crook. The United States government has flatly branded Deripaska
as an allegedly murderous mafia goon.

On April 6, 2018—curiously, just a month after Deripaska

submitted his Daily Caller op-ed— the United States Treasury
Department and the U.S. Department of State designated him (and
some other Russian oligarchs) for a litany of crimes that would
impress John Wayne Gacy. (“Designated” sounds milquetoast, but
it’s a serious term reserved uniquely for terrorists, for mega-
narcotics traffickers and for nations that stand officiously athwart
American interests).

In a press release announcing Deripaska’s designation, Treasury

Secretary Steven Mnuchin observed that Russia’s government
operates primarily to benefit billionaire cronies like Deripaska,
and that Russian officials busy themselves “attempting to subvert
Western democracies.”

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The Treasury Department alleged that Deripaska has engaged in

murder for hire. Treasury officials also cited Deripaska for money
laundering, bribery, threatening to murder various business
competitors, illegally wiretapping an official of an unidentified
government and all manner of extortion and racketeering. And the
U.S. government has massively sanctioned Deripaska—freezing a
slew of his assets and threatening to punish bankers in any cranny
of the world who try to circumvent the sanctions.

And so The Daily Caller published an in-the-flesh James Bond

villain weaving conspiracy theories and implicating American
citizens in bizarrely fictional “Deep State” crimes—catnip for the
conservative media audience he is all-too-familiar with. He had
virtually nothing to say about U.S.-Russian relations. He didn’t
even have anything to say about villainy. It was just propaganda.

I can’t speak for Patel or for Carlson, who had largely left The Daily
Caller for cable-news stardom by then, but the general sentiment
at the Caller always seemed to be that all publicity—and, of course,
all those precious, precious page views—was wonderful. The
throng of page views was certainly good for my little opinion
section, which had been downright beleaguered before I took over.

But I felt terrible. I felt dirty. It was the beginning of the end for
me at The Daily Caller. Around that time, I found out my blood
pressure was crazy high.

“Are you stressed out at work?” the doctor asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

So I quit the job. My relationship with The Daily Caller—and with

what we can call the American right—was already under great
strain since the 2016 election, and it has since deteriorated pretty
completely.

And that’s the end of my little story. As I say: Tempest in a teapot.

The Daily Caller trudges forth just fine without me. Carlson, who
from a social perspective will always be a genuinely amazing
human being, seems to be getting swell ratings.

In a broader sense, though, America’s right-wing media

environment has become a hellscape.

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When Carlson and Patel launched The Daily Caller in 2010, the
goal was laudable and straightforward: to build a first-class,
objective news organization. Sure, they probably wanted to staff it
mainly with conservatives. They did. But Carlson was interested
first and foremost in facts. (As an aside, one of my favorite Tucker-
isms is never to call anything “controversial.” Describe the
controversy, because that’s the news, see.)

“People want reliable information they’re not getting other places,”

Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review in 2011. “If that’s
right-wing, the world has turned upside down.”

“I’m not running around whining about media bias, because I

think it’s both pointless and unattractive, and I hate whining—
that’s why I’m not a liberal in the first place. And I don’t think it as
simple as ‘all reporters are Democrats,’” Carlson also said in the
2011 interview.

Discussing the then-noteworthy Tea Party movement, he added:

“If you can be the site that writes straightforward stories about
what this suddenly significant political movement is all about, you
could probably do pretty well. That’s our goal.”

And yet fast-forward seven years later, to the 2018 Deripaska op-
ed. Recall that the Senate’s report speaks of Deripaska’s “Kremlin-
approved and -directed active measures campaigns.” Recall that
the Treasury Department cited Deripaska for an array of crimes,
including murder.

How can Carlson and Patel fail to see that the Deripaska op-ed
about a “Deep State” was a very real part of exactly this sort of
Kremlin-approved campaign? How can they not feel like suckers
used by a hostile foreign nation?

Carlson and Patel—and a host of others (Breitbart, etc., etc.)—tried

to give Americans a choice by creating new media organizations to
compete with existing major news organizations. And that’s good.
Choice is good. Competition is good.

But something happened on the way to that place. The Daily Caller
is no longer an alternative news organization. Breitbart is no way
in hell any kind of alternative news organization.

These aren’t alternative news websites. Too many times, they are
alternative realities, complete with alternate sets of facts. It’s an
epistemological nightmare.

And, in the case of the 2018 Deripaska op-ed, which I myself

published and placed despite my own doubts and qualms, The
Daily Caller was the plaything of a Russian billionaire working
directly with Russian spies who used conservative media to spout
completely false and fabulous conspiracy theories.

--

Eric Owens was a writer and editor at The Daily Caller from
2012 to 2018.

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