Cars.com has announced that it will cease advertising on Fox News Channel’s ‘Hannity’ after the program’s host, Sean Hannity, promoted a largely discredited story about the murder of a Democratic National Committee staffer over several broadcasts, after which he promised to stop mentioning the case out of concern for the victim’s family.
“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,” the company said in a statement. “In this case, we’ve been watching closely and have recently made the decision to pull our advertising from Hannity,” stated a spokesman for Cars.com.
A Fox News could not be reached for immediate comment. Handy said in a recent interview with The Huffington Post that the ad shifts represented efforts by progressives to silence him. “There’s nothing that I did, nothing that I said, except they don’t like my position politically,” he said. “They’ll try to ratchet up the intensity of their rationale. It does not justify an attempt to get me fired. And that’s what this is. This is an attempt to take me out. This is a kill shot.”
The topic of concern is a widely discredited story about the death of Seth Rich, a DNC staffer who was murdered in Washington, D.C. last July in what local police believe was a botched robbery. Sean Hannity has promoted an unproven theory that Rich was killed in exchange for providing internal documents to Wikileaks, which prompted outrage from the Rich family.
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