Fox News host Sean Hannity lost an advertiser Wednesday after peddling a debunked conspiracy theory surrounding the death of former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, BuzzFeed reported.
Cars.com announced it’s pulling its ads from Hannity’s show just one day after the Fox News host said he would stop talking about the story “for now.”
“The fact that we advertise on a particular program doesn’t mean that we agree or disagree, or support or oppose, the content,” a spokesman for the company said in a statement to BuzzFeed.”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.”
Hannity has come under fire for continuing to push a conspiracy theory suggesting Rich, who was murdered in Washington D.C. in July, was somehow involved with the WikiLeaks dump of hacked emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Rich’s family has denied the allegations.
“Our beloved son Seth Rich was gunned down in the early hours of July 10, 2016, in his Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Bloomingdales,” his parents recently wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “On the day he was murdered, Seth was excited about a new job he had been offered on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”
On Tuesday, Fox News retracted the story saying in a statement: “The article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require from all our reporting.”
It’s too early to tell whether other advertisers will follow suit. Last month Fox News’ biggest star, Bill O’Reilly, was forced out after more than 50 advertisers dropped his top rated show following the disclosure of a series of sexual harassment allegations against him.
Fox News and Cars.com did not immediately respond to a request for comment.