NRATV

» see nratv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

There is no version of my life where I was in the audience for this one. NRATV was an American gun-politics channel for American gun owners, streamed mostly to people already paying dues to the organization that funded it. What earns it a grave here is the shape of the ending: a thirty-year advertising relationship built an entire television network and then took it down with itself.

The predecessor, NRA News, started in 2004 and was delivered through apps and browsers rather than through any cable deal. In 2016 it was expanded and rebranded as NRATV, running around the clock under the slogan "America's Most Patriotic Team on a Mission to Take Back The Truth". Oliver North hosted programming under a contract reported at a million dollars.

Ackerman McQueen, an advertising agency in Oklahoma City, created and operated both NRA News and NRATV on the association's behalf. The agency was the NRA's largest vendor and the NRA was the agency's largest client, a dependency that works right up until the day one side wants out.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the audience nobody could verify ~

The channel had no ratings in the sense a cable network has ratings. It streamed, and the only people who knew how many were watching were the people running the stream and billing for it. When the relationship collapsed, that became one of the accusations in open court: the NRA alleged that Ackerman McQueen had deceived it about NRATV's audience size.

That is the structural hazard of an owned channel. You are the broadcaster and the measurement bureau at once, and the invoice arrives whatever the number turns out to be. The content itself drifted accordingly, since nothing outside the building was pulling it back toward anyone's definition of working.

~ the split ~

Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's chief executive, announced the halt to content production on 25 June 2019, saying members had raised concerns that the messaging had strayed from the core mission of defending the Second Amendment. The same week, the NRA and Ackerman McQueen confirmed they were ending a partnership of more than three decades.

The lawsuits were uglier than the shutdown. The NRA accused the agency of breach of contract and of engineering a failed attempt to remove LaPierre, and both sides went after tens of millions of dollars. In its own filings the association wrote that NRATV's messaging had moved into themes some of its leaders found distasteful and racist, and that the channel had come to be viewed as a dystopian cultural rant that deterred membership growth. That is an organization describing, under oath, the thing it had been paying for.

nratv.nra.org no longer completes a TLS handshake.

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