On Saturday, March 9, Jeanine Pirro, on her regular Fox show, lit into Ilhan Omar, the freshman Democratic representative from Minnesota. “Omar wears a hijab,” Pirro said. “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which, in itself, is antithetical to the United States Constitution?” It was a scandalous diatribe. On Saturday, Pirro’s show was off the air. Instead, Fox reran an episode of the documentary series, Scandalous, focusing on a 1991 rape case involving JFK’s nephew. The schedule change irked one high-profile viewer. “Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro,” President Trump tweeted, tagging Fox.

Had Fox brought Judge Jeanine to justice? The network wouldn’t say, but CNN’s Brian Stelter reported, based on a conversation with a source, that Fox had, indeed, formally suspended Pirro over her Omar comments. The New York Times’s Michael M. Grynbaum soon confirmed that reporting. According to Stelter, Fox has not fired Pirro. It’s not yet clear when her show will return. Nor was it clear when, or why, the decision was taken. Fox publicly condemned Pirro’s remarks the day after they aired—an unusual move for the network. Some observers speculated that Friday’s horrifying mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, may have been decisive given the Islamophobic tenor of the scandal. “Maybe [Fox] had a nightmare vision,” Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU, tweeted. “Pirro on a short leash, but getting urged on by Individual One [Trump], with the NZ attacks as fuel for a wildfire she could start with one remark.”

ICYMI: New Zealand massacre—Journalists divided on how to cover hate



Others, including Stelter, suggested pressure from advertisers likely factored into Fox’s calculus. As The Hollywood Reporter’s Jeremy Barr reported early last week, at least four corporate advertisers dropped Pirro after the Omar episode. At the same time, advertisers also fled Tucker Carlson’s show after Media Matters for America, a left-wing media monitoring group, dug up and published offensive comments Carlson made on Bubba The Love Sponge’s shock-jock radio show. Last Wednesday, Media Matters organized a noisy protest outside Fox News’s Manhattan headquarters, timed to coincide with an ad-pitch meeting going on inside. “The boycott and Media Matters is having an effect on them, and I really think it’s a bottom-line effect,” David Zurawik, a media writer at The Baltimore Sun, told Stelter on Reliable Sources yesterday.

Fox is no stranger to ad pressure following on-air controversy. Laura Ingraham faced an advertiser boycott last year; Sean Hannity faced three. In December, at least 18 companies yanked commercials from Carlson’s show after he said immigrants make the US “poorer and dirtier and more divided.” The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi wrote, during that episode, that these boycotts have tended to be like snowstorms: “initially disruptive and attention-getting but usually ephemeral.” Sustained outrage is a long-term ratings—and revenue—draw for Fox; in the short term, the network has been known simply to move ads to less controversial shows. It’s rarer for hosts to go off air, but hardly unprecedented. In the past, Bill O’Reilly, Jesse Watters, and Ingraham have all taken abrupt “vacations.” Stoking controversy is obviously tiring work.

As Farhi noted, sustained ad boycotts have forced change in the past: in 2011, a two-year campaign forced Glenn Beck off Fox. And as Zurawik said on CNN yesterday, moving ad inventory away from prime time is not a sustainable tactic. Nonetheless, it would be naive to expect that Fox’s benching of Pirro will prove a tipping point. We’ve seen this dance before: Fox, under advertiser pressure, makes a short-term concession, tries to keep it low key, then reverts things to the way they were before. Pirro was not granted the vacation excuse. But we shouldn’t be surprised if she’s soon back and picking up where she left off.

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Below, more on Pirro and Fox:



A quick PSA: The Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights at Columbia Journalism School is hosting its inaugural symposium with Jelani Cobb, the center’s director, on Monday, April 1, at 4.30pm. Panelists include Carol Anderson, Martha Mendoza, Jenni Monet, Ginger Thompson, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. For more information, click here.



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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.