Remember when bigoted Fox News hosts were forced to take unscheduled ‘vacations’ when their hateful speech kicked up controversy and advertisers, feeling pressure from outraged consumers, would head for the exits? It’s been a long-standing Fox News tradition, as a way to cool the marketplace temperature and ride out storms.
In 2018, Laura Ingraham hastily left for “a pre-planned vacation” as advertisers started fleeing her show after she mocked a Parkland school shooting survivor online. The year before, Sean Hannity suddenly vanished from the airwaves when advertisers began dropping his time slot when he kept fueling an ugly conspiracy theory about the murder of Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee staffer.
And last summer, Tucker Carlson announced a “long-planned” vacation that weirdly started on a Tuesday night, just as high-profile advertisers were ditching him after CNN discovered that Carlson’s head writer had spent years pseudonymously posting wildly vulgar, KKK-like rants online. Continue reading.