If the financial fallout from the O’Reilly backlash was relatively minor — many advertisers simply shifted their spending to other Fox News programs<br />— it was difficult to ignore the public image of at least 50 major brands withdrawing support from the network’s most popular host.<br />Days later, the Fox News star Bill O’Reilly was out — taking with him a payout of up to $25 million — a strikingly swift fall ushered in by an advertising exodus<br />that rattled the highest reaches of the Fox empire and delivered an unsettling message to corporate America: You’re on notice.<br />“You need to be able to mobilize supporters to mount enough public pressure<br />that they feel they need to respond,” Angelo Carusone, the president of the liberal website Media Matters and a veteran of advertiser boycott campaigns, said of Fox News.<br />In interviews, leaders of the online campaign to topple Mr. O’Reilly said they believed<br />that while Fox News management would stand behind its star anchor, the network might be vulnerable to other pressures.<br />Companies are “a bit on edge about how they engage and react in this moment,” said Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, an online racial justice group<br />that encouraged its million-plus members to protest Mr. O’Reilly’s behavior.<br />Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research, said Fox News probably recognized<br />that installing a replacement anchor for Mr. O’Reilly would not necessarily lead to a giant drop-off in viewers.
