If you’ve been on Facebook or Twitter in the last 48 hours, you’ve likely seen video of people destroying their Keurig coffee machines or throwing them out the window as a protest to the company pulling its ads from Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News.
According to multiple reports, Keurig and other companies pulled ads because of Hannity’s response to the sexual assault allegations made against Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate from Alabama – seemingly at the urging of liberal group Media Matters for America.
In the aftermath, some Hannity fans took their feelings out on their coffee machines.
But Keurig was hardly alone in pulling its ads from Hannity’s show. One of the companies that supposedly pulled its ads is realtor.com, or so it appeared.
Sponsors that have pulled ads from Sean Hannity's show:
•Keurig
•https://t.co/GGcoBDXpsR
•23andMe
•Eloquii
•Nature's Bounty
•Volvo
•Conagrahttps://t.co/lS1uD1JO2w— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) November 14, 2017
Here’s how it all went down.
On Sunday, realtor.com’s Twitter account replied to a question about its advertisements on Fox News and Hannity’s program, stating that the website would no longer be running ads on Hannity’s show.
“Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We are adjusting our media buy to no longer include this show placement,” the tweet read.
Just one tweet. That’s all it took for realtor.com to make the list of companies that were boycotting Hannity’s show.
In the aftermath of that tweet, there were slight social media murmurs about a backlash against realtor.com, but the movement didn’t go viral like the anti-Keurig one did.
But here’s the thing. The tweet isn’t even there anymore. It’s deleted. And realtor.com has no plans to stop advertising on Fox or on Hannity’s show.
“We advertise on dozens of television networks and hundreds of shows quarterly as a way to introduce realtor.com to the widest audience possible,” the company posted on its website on Sunday. “We will continue to place ads across a broad range of networks, including Fox News and its top shows.”
Additionally, a spokesperson for realtor.com told HousingWire that the company expects that realtor.com advertising will continue to appear on Hannity and other Fox shows.
As for the tweet in question, a source close to the situation said that the tweet was posted in error and deleted once it was discovered.
But that didn’t stop other media outlets (including this one) from covering realtor.com’s not boycott.
But here’s why this whole thing is basically ridiculous.
As the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos pointed out yesterday, realtor.com is owned by News Corp. News Corp acquired Move Inc., which operates realtor.com for the National Association of Realtors, in November 2014.
News Corp also owns The Wall Street Journal, Marketwatch, the New York Post, and Harper Collins. News Corp is chaired by Rupert Murdoch, who also chairs 21st Century Fox. 21st Century Fox, which owns Fox, Fox News, and everything else that starts with Fox, was spun off of News Corp in 2013.
So, the chance that a Murdoch-owned web property actively boycotts a Fox News program? Slim to none.
So this whole thing is a waste of time and just another excuse for the social media echo chamber to get into an uproar about something.
But in the end, it’s a whole lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing – as things so often are these days.
[Update: This article is updated to accurately reflect the relationship between News Corp, Move, Realtor.com, and the Fox networks.]
