ABOUT a dozen companies have withdrawn their commercials from “Glenn Beck,” the Fox News Channel program, after Glenn Beck, the person, said late last month that President Obama was a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times
After Glenn Beck said that President Obama was a racist, a political group began contacting his advertisers.
The companies that have moved their ads elsewhere in recent days included ConAgra, Geico, Procter & Gamble and the insurance company Progressive. In a statement that echoed the comments of other companies, ConAgra said on Thursday that “we are firmly committed to diversity, and we would like to prevent the potential perception that advertising during this program was an endorsement of the viewpoints shared.”
Its success also indicates that as commentary on cable news reaches a rhetorical boiling point, advertisers may become more skittish about being near it.
“We have TV today that’s very polarizing and controversial,” said Donny Deutsch, the advertising executive and occasional host on CNBC and MSNBC, a rival to Fox News.
Last month, Mr. Deutsch listed some of the “Glenn Beck” advertisers and told MSNBC viewers that people who objected to Mr. Beck’s remark should write to the chief executives of the companies. In an interview, he said corporate decisions about where to allot ad dollars were the “ultimate check and balance.”
The sponsors’ shifts came after a campaign by ColorOfChange.org, a black political coalition, to contact sponsors of Mr. Beck’s program. The remark by Mr. Beck, a conservative radio host and comedian who joined Fox News in January, came not on his 5 p.m. talk show but on “Fox and Friends,” a raucous morning program.
That day, Fox News appeared to distance itself quickly from Mr. Beck’s remark that Mr. Obama was a racist, telling the TVNewser blog that Mr. Beck had “expressed a personal opinion, which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel.”
Two days later, ColorOfChange asked its 600,000 members to sign a petition addressed to Mr. Beck’s advertisers. It says more than 100,000 have signed.
Fox said the campaign had no financial effect.
“The advertisers referenced have all moved their spots from Beck to other day parts on the network, so there has been no revenue lost,” said a spokeswoman for the channel, a unit of the News Corporation.
Still, ColorOfChange trumpeted the advertisers’ announcements as meaningful wins in news releases this month, and announced on Thursday that ConAgra, the pharmaceutical companies Roche and Sanofi-Aventis, and the electronics retailer RadioShack had pledged to remove ads from “Glenn Beck.”
An official at RadioShack told the advocacy group that it had not bought time directly on Fox News, but that a third-party manufacturer had cited the retailer in its commercials. RadioShack said it had asked the manufacturer, magicJack, to “immediately cease and desist running all commercials with our name tagged in the spot“ on the Beck program.
Other companies also said their spots had been scheduled during “Glenn Beck” by mistake. Ads for Procter & Gamble and S.C. Johnson appeared on a weekend repeat of Mr. Beck’s program by mistake, Fox acknowledged. Progressive said that its advertising order had specified “no Glenn Beck,” but Fox said it had bought a block of time with the channel that included Mr. Beck.
Past efforts to put pressure on cable news advertisers have met more resistance. In the spring, when the liberal group ThinkProgress protested Bill O’Reilly of Fox News by contacting corporate sponsors, most wrote back by blandly thanking them for taking the time to write. One Ford Motor employee even suggested they abandon the petition tactic, writing, “the silly form letters are just annoying and easy to delete.”
In the current media climate, one dominated by talk about health care and other politically tinged topics, hosts and commentators on TV and radio seemingly try to one-up one another with shocking comments every day. Recently, Lou Dobbs of CNN came under fire for raising questions about Mr. Obama’s citizenship. CNN said it had not seen any advertisers “looking to reallocate their money” from Mr. Dobbs’s program.
What Mr. Beck said about Mr. Obama in July was “race-baiting packaged as news,“ said James Rucker, the executive director of ColorOfChange. (Mr. Beck declined to comment.)
In what was ColorOfChange’s first direct appeal to advertisers, it told members it was fighting back by “hitting Beck where it hurts,” financially. The Beck program draws an average 2.2 million viewers a day, making it Fox News’s third-highest rated.
Mr. Rucker acknowledged that advertiser campaigns are tough, saying that “things have to be at a certain level in terms of being pretty extreme” for the sponsors to take action.
Mr. Deutsch, the chairman of the ad agency Deutsch Inc., said that “at a company like Procter & Gamble or G.M., the C.E.O.’s don’t know where all those ad dollars are going.” When they find out that their messages are being associated with controversial comments, they often “decide they can go somewhere else,” he said.
Calling Fox News a “good network,” Mr. Deutsch said advertisers could easily move their spots to other programs.
That is what several sponsors said they have done. Mr. Rucker said some of the advertisers “didn’t even know that they were actually enabling Beck” when they were contacted.
Mirroring the verbal combat among cable news channels, the advertiser pressure has become a divisive issue of its own. On conservative blogs this week, writers have questioned ColorOfChange’s motives and asked supporters of Mr. Beck’s to write to his advertisers as well.
