Real America’s Voice: How a tiny pro-Trump news network founded by a convicted criminal got so close to the president

Off-screen, someone cackled. Sitting square in the center of the frame Vice President JD Vance laughed, amused at the sartorial inquisition. To his left, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat perfectly still, his expression implacable while he turned his head to the side, as if searching for someone in a crowd.

“Yeah. You have problems?” replied Zelensky, who was wearing military fatigues, as he has done since his country was invaded by Russia three years ago. 

“A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting this office,” said Glenn, who was dressed in a royal blue suit that contrasted to the more traditional navy and gray suits worn by those around him.

Glenn’s question would have likely gone unnoticed—it is common knowledge that Zelensky wears military gear in solidarity with Ukrainian soldiers—had it not also occurred at the exact same time as a momentous shift in American foreign policy. America’s priority in the war was no longer supporting Ukraine, to the tune of billions of dollars, but rather negotiating a rapprochement with Russia. As a result, Zelensky found himself pilloried for his attire rather than lionized for his resolve. 

Through temerity, coincidence, and luck, Glenn and Real America’s Voice (RAV), the network he worked for, had earned themselves a front-row seat to Trump’s reshaping of American history.

• Fortune’s series on Trump Media & Technology Group
• The company building Trump Media’s tech has historic links to Iran, Russia, and China
• Trump’s $8 billion media company creates a complex set of potential conflicts for the incoming president
• Real America’s Voice: How a tiny pro-Trump news network founded by a convicted criminal got so close to the president
• Trump Media is quietly storing at least one of its data centers in a facility owned by a longtime Republican donor and media mogul
• Trump Media lockup deadline leaves Trump with a choice: trigger a fire sale or hold a meme stock

Covering Trump, the president, while doing business with Trump, the mogul 

Every day from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. RAV airs back-to-back-to-back shows from three of the most influential rightwing commentators in the country. In those five hours, Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, and Jack Posobiec stream their podcasts on the channel, which beams them out across the country on Apple TV, Roku, DishTV , and others. As of last year all three shows are now also broadcast on Truth Social and its sister streaming platform Truth+. Both are part of the burgeoning tech holdings of the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), whose largest shareholder is Trump.

RAV—once an also-ran to Fox News and Newsmax in the conservative news business—is now in the enviable position of being the key link between Trump’s company and his most prominent boosters in the media. With its newly acquired spot in the White House press pool, RAV has gone, in just a few years, from being an upstart TV network to walking the halls of American power.

And it finds itself straddling a line: As a media outlet it covers Trump the president, but it is also a content provider for Trump the businessman’s company.

Ethics lawyers said this dynamic was unprecedented, even compared to Trump’s first term. “It’s both that the Trump business empire has expanded into new industries, and also that Trump himself has declined to take even the modest steps that he took in his first administration” to divest himself, said Eric Petry, a government ethics lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute at NYU Law School. 

Trump’s media company poses a unique set of ethical questions because he is both a newsmaking public official and a purveyor of news content. “I think it’s unethical for a president to hold control over large media platforms,” said Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer for former President George W. Bush. “I think the press should be separated from the state.”

A TMTG spokesperson did not respond to a list of detailed questions about the company’s ethics policies. They referred to Fortune’s questions as “absurd accusations.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment. 

The birth of a conservative news channel

For this story, Fortune spoke to six former employees, including on-air talent, producers, camera operators, and content strategists who worked for RAV’s parent company, Performance One Media, and its subsidiaries. 

They described a workplace cleaved in two. On one side, a traditional, straight-down-the-middle weather channel; and on the other, an adamantly conservative news network that makes no secret of its politics. They also described a demanding, high-performance environment, which at times was a hostile workplace either sanctioned or perpetrated by the company’s most senior leaders.  

“Fear and self-doubt were weaponized at WeatherNation and Performance One in order to keep us looking over our shoulders while towing the company line,” said Steven Martinez-Partida, a former vice president at RAV’s sister channel WeatherNation. “It was kind of cultish, with true believers showered with favor and praise and everyone else viewed with suspicion about their ulterior motives.”

Real America’s Voice is the brainchild of Robert Sigg, a Colorado-based media entrepreneur with a checkered legal past. In 2006, around the same time he founded Performance One, Sigg was convicted of federal mortgage fraud in a multi-million dollar scheme. He was sentenced to time served and ordered to pay $141,000 in restitution to Washington Mutual Bank.

The incident in 2006 was not Sigg’s only brush with the law. Over the course of his life Sigg has been charged with assault, harassment, drug possession, driving under the influence, domestic violence, and burglary in Colorado, according to arrest records from the Colorado Bureau of Investigations. Fortune contacted eight police departments and nine courthouses across Colorado to obtain police reports and court rulings on Sigg’s legal travails. Records for certain arrests and subsequent cases, some of which were more than 40 years old, were no longer available because police departments and courthouses had deleted older files. Out of his numerous arrests Sigg pled guilty to at least four charges — for driving under the influence, using a fake ID, contempt of court, and violating his probation.

Sigg and Performance One did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Before branching out into news with RAV, Sigg dedicated himself to launching a competitor to the Weather Channel, called WeatherNation. Sigg came to control WeatherNation after he fell out with its original founders, the well-known meteorologist Paul Douglas and his business partner Craig Mataczynski. The details of how Sigg and Performance One took ownership of WeatherNation have not been previously reported. 

In 2010, Performance One had started providing media industry consulting services to Douglas and Mataczynski’s original incarnation of WeatherNation. Douglas and Mataczynski would produce weather content, while Performance One handled all the logistics of getting it distributed to broadcasters around the country, Mataczynski told Fortune. That arrangement didn’t last. 

Eventually the “economics just weren’t working out for both parties and it caused stress in the relationship,” Mataczynski said. 

What had started as an amicable and mutually beneficial business relationship eventually turned acrimonious. Exacerbating those tensions was the fact that Performance One had started producing its own weather content, Mataczynski added. Eventually, the relationship between the three soured definitively. In 2014, Performance One sued WeatherNation for $1.2 million in unpaid consulting fees. Two months later, the companies settled the lawsuit and Sigg’s Performance One gained control of WeatherNation. Douglas and Mataczynski still retain a stake in WeatherNation, that is “well below 20%,” Mataczynski said.

Mataczynski said that while there wasn’t bad blood between him and Sigg the two had different styles of doing business.

“[Sigg] would not be somebody that I would seek out to do business with,” Mataczynski said. “There’s these personalities, I’ve met them many times in business over the years, that they just need to know they have gotten more than you have.”

In early 2016, after successfully transforming WeatherNation from a startup into a thriving business, Sigg decided to turn his attention to news because he felt he wanted a new challenge, former employees told Fortune. At the same time, Trump was storming through the 17-candidate Republican primary on his way to the nomination. 

“I believe Robb Sigg saw RAV as a business opportunity to exploit as well as a challenge that he needed to move forward,” Martinez-Partida said.

Sigg was a ‘mercurial’ boss 

In its early days, WeatherNation had the sort of fast-paced environment common to most new companies, where employees are given broad responsibilities but expected to work long hours to build something from the ground up. During this period, the management style of Sigg and other Performance One executives could be coarse, according to former employees. Those employees described a workplace where there was little accountability for those at the top, given Sigg’s control of the company.

“The owners were running all aspects of the business with a very hands-on approach,” Martinez-Partida said. “It was an autocratic management style that often pitted individuals and groups against one another while circumventing and isolating others, fostering divisiveness and mistrust.” 

Martinez-Partida also described Sigg as “the sweetest guy in the world when he was in the mood” and recalled his habit of regularly treating the WeatherNation office to lunch. Other employees also said they got along well with Sigg and that he regularly praised staffers for a job well done. 

But former employees also described Sigg as “volatile” and “mercurial” and his deputy and current RAV president Michael Norton as “really hard.”  

Two former employees cited an incident in which a 23-year-old meteorologist was threatened with having $5,000 deducted from her pay because she posted a WeatherNation video of a burning house floating down a river during a flood on her social media accounts. When the video went viral, Sigg instructed a member of Performance One’s IT department to calculate an “estimation of lost revenue” that her post had cost the company on the grounds it had taken away attention from WeatherNation’s own social media pages. 

“I knew it to be nonsense,” said a former employee who was present for the meeting. “It was presented to her in a meeting with everybody scowling at her, to get her to cry. [They] then tore up this invoice they had given her after making it seem like they were going to dock her pay the amount of money that had been lost due to her social media postings, which was kind of ridiculous.”

The young meteorologist was confronted by Norton. Also in the meeting was Performance One’s then-head of human resources Nancy Wingo, who did not intervene, the meteorologist who posted the video told Fortune.

“I was looking at her, because of how he was talking to me while I’m bawling, crying, as a little 23-year-old,” she said in an interview. “I was like, ‘are you gonna let him talk like this?’ And she was sitting there. She knew it was wrong.”

Wingo and Norton did not respond to requests for comment. 

In another instance, at Sigg’s birthday party, he threw a slice of cake at an employee who had made a joke about Tim Tebow, the former Denver Broncos quarterback, whom he was a big fan of, according to one former employee.

While some employees chafed at the conservative orthodoxy they said permeated Real America’s Voice, others described a dynamic and fulfilling workplace where sharing those values was never a prerequisite for employment. Employees also said that Performance One made a point of keeping the politics of Real America’s Voice separate from WeatherNation’s nonpartisan weather coverage.

“The sides of the business when I was there were really separate,” said Lucy Sledge, a former communications manager at WeatherNation.

Sigg spots an opportunity to align business and politics

With Trump upending—and eventually controlling—the Republican party after 2016, Sigg’s foray into news was a business opportunity that aligned with his personal politics, according to former employees.

“People let it be known far and wide that they were conservative and the company was conservative,” said a former camera operator. Employees who criticized Trump were given the “evil eye” and eventually learned to just “keep their mouth shut” about any political differences they may have had, he added. 

Despite his own political views, Sigg saw the possibility to branch out into a conservative news channel as first and foremost a business opportunity that had become even more promising, with Trump’s entry into policies, according to former employees. WeatherNation was already set up to compete on-air with well-established media brands, all Sigg had to do was pivot his company’s focus from weather to politics.

“It was a concept that he could envision and implement quickly knowing he already had the people, technology and other resources to implement his vision,” Martinez-Partida said. 

Eventually much of the resources Sigg funneled toward RAV came at the expense of WeatherNation, which caused friction between the two sides of the company, former employees told Fortune.

“RAV that was their baby,” said the former camera operator, who regularly worked for WeatherNation and did so only once for RAV before refusing to take any more such assignments. “The owners of the company were really into Trump, conservatism and the whole Republican movement. So that’s where all the money was being funneled to…our [WeatherNation’s] budgets were being slashed while they [RAV] were all getting good equipment and a bus.”

While Real America’s Voice is now firmly ensconced in conservative politics, in the past, at least, Sigg may have flirted with the Democratic Party. Sigg has donated repeatedly to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, and to Hilary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign, which she ran against Trump, according to Federal Election Commission records.  

Even Bannon, one of RAV’s marquee on-air talents, questioned how committed Sigg and his team were to the MAGA movement. “I’m not even sure they’re conservatives,” Bannon told the Washington Post in 2022. 

‘Assembling the leaders of the MAGA movement’

Securing the distribution rights for Bannon’s War Room podcast in 2019 was a turning point for RAV’s credibility in the world of conservative media. Sigg saw the chance to scoop up a popular show that needed the reach Bannon coveted and his widely distributed RAV could offer. War Room now airs twice a day, and once on Saturdays. Each show features Bannon’s trademark combativeness—the opposition is “demonic”—and support for Trump—who is “divinely inspired to lead this nation to a new golden age.”

Over the next several years Sigg would acquire distribution rights for other big-name conservative hosts such as Kirk and Posobiec. Bannon, Kirk, and Posobiec did not respond to requests for comment. 

“I look at it as a way of assembling the leaders of the MAGA movement, the leaders of the conservative movement that has been all-in on Donald Trump,” said John Pelissero, director of government ethics Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

However frustrated they may or may not have been with RAV’s politics, all the employees Fortune spoke to commended Sigg as a savvy businessman. Mataczynski, the original owner of WeatherNation, was also unequivocal that Sigg was a “good businessman” who had a clear strategy that he executed successfully. Sigg, along with lieutenants like Norton, set out securing distribution agreements with the likes of Roku and Apple, found advertisers to keep the revenues coming in, and built a television studio capable of broadcasting RAV’s content across the country. Paired with the logistics of a TV network came a clear editorial point of view: support Donald Trump. 

When TMTG ventured into streaming last year, it turned to RAV to fill its need for content because the network had already built its bona fides with a large portion of the president’s voting base. That move made RAV simultaneously a member of the fourth estate covering an elected official and one of that official’s business partners. 

The fact that RAV has business relationships with TMTG could affect its coverage of Trump’s White House, ethics experts said. A company like RAV could “ingratiate themselves to the president to do business with the president’s company,” said Painter, the former ethics lawyer in the Bush administration. “And then they’ll get preferential access at the White House, while the guy from the New York Times will be standing outside the gate.”

The closeness between Trumpworld and RAV extends beyond the unflinching support Trump receives on its airwaves. There are off-camera, real-world connections between key Trump allies and RAV personnel. Glenn, the White House correspondent, is dating Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, one of Trump’s most loyal allies in the House. Gina Loudon, president of programming at Real America’s Voice and one of its top media personalities, was a former advisor to Trump’s 2020 campaign and co-chair of the political group Women for Trump. Two photos posted to Loudon’s Instagram account in the summer of 2020 are some of the few publicly available pictures of Sigg.

A photo from June 2020 depicts Loudon and Sigg, who has his arm aloft making a peace sign with his fingers, as the two board a private plane. “How did I get so blessed?,” reads the caption. “Working SO hard every day…building building…No more fake news coming your way.”