Sexual Harassment Allegations Come With a Hefty Price, for O’Reilly and for Fox News
April 1 was not a fun April Fool’s Day for Bill O’Reilly. On Saturday The New York Times published a scathing article reporting that about Fox News and O’Reilly had paid five women about $13 million in response to their charges of sexual harassment.
On Monday, Mercedes-Benz became the first advertiser to drop O’Reilly’s top-rated Fox News show. Less than 24 hours since, a total of 11 advertisers have now left “The O’Reilly Factor.”Â
Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, BMW of North America, Constant Contact, Ainsworth Pet Nutrition, UNTUCKit, Allstate, T. Rowe Price, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi are the advertisers, according to a report (updated several times in the past few minutes) by CNNMoney. NBC News adds Mitsubishi to the list.
“The allegations are disturbing and, given the importance of women in every aspect of our business, we don’t feel this is a good environment in which to advertise our products right now,” Mercedes-Benz spokeswoman Donna Boland told CNNMoney.
Two years ago, Angie’s List stood tall when then-Governor Mike Pence signed an anti-LGBT “religoious freedom” bill into law. That activism and support for social justice apparently does not exist now.
“The advertising strategy we have long used at Angie’s List is meant to reach as many people as possible with news that our service exists and is available to them,” a spokeswoman for Angie’s List told CNNMoney. “We place ads across a wide spectrum of venues intending to reach as many viewers/listeners/ readers as possible without taking a position on the viewpoints of the venues themselves. Just as we trust members to make their own hiring decisions, we trust them to make their own media consumption decisions.”
The question now becomes, will the boycott take O’Reilly down, as a grassroots boycott of now-former Fox News host Glenn Beck did several years ago?
That successful boycott was created and spearheaded by Angelo Carusone, who went on to work for Media Matters. Today, he is the organization’s president.
Media Matters has published a list of all Bill O’Reilly’s advertisers.
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