Advertisers have continued to flock from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show after the polemic host made a series of remarks about Central American migrants attempting to enter the U.S. border, asserting that “unregulated” influxes of immigrants make the country “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.” Over a dozen companies including IHOP, Ancestry.com, Land Rover, and Pacific Life announced that they’ll cease or suspend advertising for Carlson’s prime-time show, continuing a pattern of corporate outrage toward Fox News shows.
This dance is contrived and boring at this point, but it’s the advertisers who have the most to lose in this charade.
Carlson’s comments didn’t deviate much from his usual refrains on immigration. He openly advocates for border protectionism and has found himself in ample hot water for his comments on the topic before.
In July, Carlson falsely accused an immigration attorney on his show of being in the country illegally. In August, Carlson said, “I actually hate litter, which is one of the reasons I’m so against illegal immigration.”
I don’t believe that Carlson actually holds racist sympathies, but the point is that the outrage machine decided that he did long ago, which calls into question why advertisers are just now choosing these new par-for-the-course comments as the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The corporate rush to performative wokeness won’t end well for companies who think they’ll earn a splash of decent public relations (or avoid some bad PR) for dropping Carlson. In a column originally about boycotts of Bill O’Reilly’s show, Politico’s Jack Shafer rightly critiqued the practice as a threatening step back to the days where corporate advertisers had the power to control independent media. And boycotting Carlson for things he said as opposed to things O’Reilly did — namely, serial sexual harassment of female staffers — treads that line even more closely.
Furthermore, once companies begin to open Pandora’s box, they’ll find themselves under fire if they continue to advertise with a host who makes any off-color comment. If companies across the board hold a clear and consistent standard of advertising based purely on financial returns, then they aren’t liable for sponsoring content. Once they wade into the game of politics, then they will be.
After Nate Silver pointed out that the “logical endpoint” of this strategy could include the end of ad-supported political content, the social media activist group Sleeping Giants, which routinely leads media boycotts, sneered, “If you’re a person of color or a member of the LGBTQ community or an immigrant, these companies are literally footing the bill for you to be vilified every week. Bigotry should not be deemed political.”
Well, as Silver pointed out, he is in fact a part of that community, and his opinion is directly informed by the days of anti-gay interest groups calling to vilify programming considered progressive. And he’s exactly right. Artists and journalists should be accountable to the public, not a few board executives at wealthy companies.
Companies that think they can get into the shame game without entering the endorsement game are fooling themselves and living in a dream world — one that results in mutually assured destruction between advertisers and programmers.
