Fox Host Lambasts Sponsors for Abandoning Show After Remarks on Soccer Stadium Deaths
Fox Soccer Channel host Steven Cohen lambasted advertisers on Sirius Radio Thursday for ending their sponsorships of his show following his comments about a fatal stadium crush that left 96 football fans dead in 1989.
Several advertisers have been persuaded to abandon Cohen’s shows by fans of Liverpool F.C. who are angry over Cohen’s position that that the Hillsborough Stadium disaster was caused by ticketless football fans attempting to force their way in to the ground, crushing those who died. (A government inquiry later found that there were very few fans without tickets, and that the design of the ground and police crowd-control actions were the prime contributors to the deaths.)
Liverpool fans have since beseiged both Cohen and his sponsors with emails complaining about the remarks and demanding a retraction. While Cohen has apologized for causing offense, he has not changed his position that the Liverpool fans at least in part contributed to the deaths. Cohen hosts World Soccer Daily on Sirius and Fox Football Fone-In on FSC.
In his Sirius show on Thursday, Cohen complained that much of the protest email he had received was anti-semitic. He read one email, which he said was from an “official member” of a Liverpool supporters’ group. The email said:
You fucking jew rodent you say we killed 96 of our own. Hitler killed six million of you. Ha ha ha …
Cohen then addressed his departing sponsors, which have included Heineken, Fado (a chain of Irish pubs in the U.S.), FourFourTwo magazine, and Ruffneck Wear (scarf merchandiser):
That is who we’re taking about. Ruffneck, I hope you feel good. Heineken, I hope you feel good. Anybody else, FourFourTwo, anybody else who thinks that is pleasant, is right and supports that, you’ve got problems.
Cohen had singled out Ruffneck on his Monday show for joining the boycott. Cohen said:
Good riddance to them. Goodbye. We’ll see what happens to that.
Ruffneck president Jeff McIntyre told BNET there there was potential litigation brewing between his company and Cohen:
We felt he breached the contract by making the statements he made and damaging our relationship with potential customers.
Cohen told BNET that he is signing new sponsors to replace those leaving:
We are in the process of doing so. And in fact having taken the position of the glass being half full as we head into a World Cup cycle. Some of these advertisers, I’m not completely displeased to have got rid of some of the people in these product categories — they should have been paying more for our show. I’m not going to mention any names.
Cohen also said he has sent the anti-semitic emails and death threats he has received to the FBI:
They were handed over to the FBI because two weeks ago in Washington, D.C., a man walked into a Holocaust museum as a known anti-semite and shot somebody dead. Hate speech and hate crimes are a crime in this country, and you can’t interfere with third-party contracts, it’s interference.
Cohen was ebullient on the phone this morning and in no way seemed fazed by the storm swirling around him.
Coming soon: BNET will publish a full Q&A with Cohen regarding his advertisers and the Hillsborough issue in the next couple of days.
Disclosure: The author is a Liverpool fan.
Jim Edwards, a former managing editor of Adweek, has covered drug marketing at Brandweek for four years, and is a former Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University's business and journalism schools. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email.
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