Leading advertising executive: Fox News presents “a moral hazard for advertisers”

Lou Paskalis on companies that pull ads from Fox prime time and move them to the dayside.“That's a bit of a head fake the industry at large has accepted ... but the testimony and discovery in Dominion has blown that away”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

Updated

Leading advertising executive Lou Paskalis, CEO and founder of AJL Advisory and former president and chief operating officer of MMA Global, is sounding the alarm over the incredible, ongoing revelations in the Fox News/Dominion case. As reported by CNN's Reliable Sources email newsletter:

Prominent advertising executive Lou Paskalis believes it is now a risk for companies to continue marketing their products on Fox News. Paskalis over the weekend published a post in which he said the Dominion revelations “present a moral hazard for advertisers" and recommended they cease sending money into the right-wing talk channel's pockets. “There are errors of omission and errors of commission," Paskalis told me Monday, indicating that Fox committed the latter. Paskalis said that it's not enough to simply pull ads from the prime time bloc and move it to the dayside. “I think that's a bit of a head fake the industry at large has accepted," he said, "but the testimony and discovery in Dominion has blown that away."

You can read Paskalis' post on the topic here. In November, Paskalis noted Twitter's mounting problems with advertisers. They have only continued since.

Media Matters maintains a list of Fox News' leading advertisers here.

One thing that Paskalis does not note is that Fox News is profitable even before it runs a single ad due to the "Fox Fee" — the obscenely, disproportionately high fee it receives monthly from cable companies for every customer who has Fox News on their system. Fox receives that fee, over $25 per year, regardless of whether the consumer watches Fox or not. You can sign up here to learn more and fight back.

Update (3/14/23): This piece has been updated to note that Paskalis is no longer affiliated with MMA Global.