Sean Hannity Loses Advertiser After Promoting Seth Rich Conspiracies
At least one company is pulling advertising from Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity’s eponymous program amid controversy over Hannity’s promotion of a conspiracy theory involving a dead Democratic National Committee staffer, BuzzFeed reported Wednesday.
A spokesman for Cars.com told BuzzFeed that they were pulling ads from “Hannity” amid a campaign to pressure advertisers to stop supporting the show.
“The fact that we advertise on a particular program doesn’t mean that we agree or disagree, or support or oppose, the content. We don’t have the ability to influence content at the time we make our advertising purchase. In this case, we’ve been watching closely and have recently made the decision to pull our advertising from Hannity,” the company said.
Hannity had frequently promoted unfounded theories that DNC employee Seth Rich, who was killed in Washington, D.C. last summer in what police believe was likely a botched robbery, had shared information about the Democratic campaign with WikiLeaks and was therefore targeted for death. Fox News retracted its own reporting on Rich’s death on Tuesday afternoon, shortly before Hannity announced on his show that he would stop pursuing the story out of respect for Rich’s family.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO