The tally is now up to 52 companies that have pulled their advertising for Bill O’Reilly’s long-running shouting showcase The O’Reilly Factor. This comes in the wake of The New York Times report that Fox News renewed his contract despite having spent, along with O’Reilly, a combined $13 million in sexual harassment settlements against the anchor over the years. While similar charges were enough to oust network head Roger Ailes last year, apparently as long as things stayed quiet, O’Reilly’s folksy brand of racially charged “good ol’ days” political punditry remained okay to keep on the air. It has all only helped his ratings, although that could just be people rubber-necking to see when the host’s notoriously explosive temper finally goes off. A vote of support from our standing president probably didn’t hurt.
Perhaps O’Reilly was further relieved to see that some of the world’s outrage moved from him to Pepsi yesterday in the wake of their supremely tasteless Kendall Jenner-solves-police-brutality ad, which has now been pulled. But lo, the internet never sleeps, and a supremely relevant old story has resurfaced.
Yes, just a short 15 years ago, a slightly less jowly O’Reilly railed against Pepsi for using goofy pop-rap mainstay Ludacris as a spokesperson. His extremely righteous reasoning was that Luda is “a man who degrades women,” and why on earth would an enormous corporation choose to advertise with a monster like that? He succeeded in getting Ludacris’s sponsorship dropped, saying, in the clip, “He’s not an artist, he’s a thug.”