Five days after Parkland school shooting survivor and gun control activist David Hogg called for a boycott of Laura Ingraham‘s advertisers, Fox News Channel is firing back.
“We cannot and will not allow voices to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts,” Jack Abernethy, co-president of Fox News, told the LA Times‘ Stephen Battaglio. “We look forward to having Laura Ingraham back hosting her program next Monday when she returns from spring vacation with her children.”
Ingraham is on a pre-scheduled vacation this week.
Kantar Media assessed the advertising time during Ingraham’s show, both before the call for a boycott and after.
From March 12-28, the average advertising time during the show was 15 minutes 13 seconds. By last Friday, March 30–two days after Hogg’s call–advertising time was 7 minutes, a 40 percent drop. By contrast, Fox News’s 8 p.m. ET show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, averaged 14 minutes and 54 seconds of commercial time from January 1-March 28. On March 30, Carlson’s ad time was 15 minutes, 30 seconds.
By the end of last week, 11 brands had pulled advertising from Ingraham’s show. Since then Bayer, Liberty Mutual, and Entertainment Studios have also pulled out.
Meanwhile, the YouGov Brand Index has found that the brands that have ceased advertising on the show have remained relatively unscathed. More troubling for Fox, however, beyond the loss of ad revenue, is that its own brand is taking a hit. Fox News Channel’s Buzz score, according to YouGov’s methodology, fell in the days following the advertiser announcements, with more consumers hearing negative things than positive:
