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A Financial Times editor calls for a Fox News advertiser boycott

Edward Luce said sponsors “bankroll the poison.”

Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference
Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference
Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp and co-chairman of 21st Century Fox, arrives at the Sun Valley Resort of the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, July 10, 2018 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The US editor of the Financial Times is calling for a boycott of companies that advertise on Fox in the wake of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and the pipe bombs sent to leading Democrats.

“The most effective thing Americans can do is boycott companies that advertise on Fox,” Edward Luce tweeted Saturday. “They bankroll the poison that goes from the studio into Trump’s head. The second is vote.”

The call was an unusual one for a journalist. But Luce — who had tweeted on Friday that Trump “has normalized the language of violence in US politics” — was one of a growing number of prominent voices, including former conservatives who oppose Trump, speaking out against Fox News and Fox Business.

Max Boot, a conservative columnist and former Christian Science Monitor editor, appeared on CNN this morning urging investors to “boycott Fox News until they pull back from the hate.”

Earlier last week, the New York Times and NBC News reported that Cesar Sayoc — who is charged in connection to the pipe bomb packages — had a Twitter feed full of “clips from Fox News broadcasts,” while the Pittsburgh shooter was upset by a conspiracy theory, alluded to by Fox News and Fox Business hosts, that Jewish billionaire George Soros was linked to the migrant caravan traveling to the US.

Over the weekend, after the mass shooting in Pittsburgh, a guest on Lou Dobbs’s show on Fox Business, Chris Farrell, who heads the conservative activist group Judicial Watch, said the migrant caravan was directed by the “Soros-occupied State Department.” Soros was the first reported target of the attempted pipe bomb attacks, and the episode attracted widespread criticism for spreading anti-Semitic tropes.

Washington Post conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin and former senior strategist of late Sen. John McCain’s campaign Steve Schmidt both tweeted harsh criticism of the segment and of Fox News more broadly.

“This repulsive and dangerous filth is bring spewed courtesy of a publicly owned corporation,” wrote Bill Kristol, an editor at large at the Weekly Standard. “Will no one on the board, in management, or in a position of influence at Fox speak up?” The episode with Farrell was later pulled, and the vice president for programming at Fox Business Network apologized.

Meanwhile, Monday morning, Fox News was speculating about whether the migrant caravan would bring disease to America.

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