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iHeart CEO Bob Pittman Continues to Greenlight Hate
Though advertisers have fled from a podcast that violates iHeart’s terms of service, CEO Bob Pittman continues greenlighting the streaming of hate.
The podcast, hosted by anti-Scientologists Leah Remini and Mike Rinder, not only features but is devoted to the kind of hate content iHeart claims to ban and which it pledges to “remove or filter” in its published policy: defamatory, indecent, obscene, abusive, threatening, harassing and discriminatory hate content that expressly and principally promotes, advocates or incites hatred or violence against a group based on religion.
Fortune 100 companies immediately pulled their advertising upon learning they were sponsoring anti-Scientology hate on iHeart Radio.
As if baiting iHeart policymakers and compliance officers, the podcast describes the Scientology religion as “pure f—king evil” and refers to Scientologists as “robot[s],” “extremists,” “manipulators,” “p—ssies,” “horrible,” “hateful” and “a bunch of f—king like body snatchers” who are “selling your soul to the devil,” “not mentally sound,” “have zero compassion,” do “not enjoy their lives,” “can’t afford to feed their families,” “can’t think for themselves,” “don’t give a sh—t,” are “morally depleted” and have “done nothing good.”
Remini even went so far as to state proudly on iHeart: “We have come after other people who have supported Scientology.”
Within one week of Holocaust Remembrance Day, a hate tweet by iHeart’s host inspired one of her followers to respond: “In the 1940’s there was a certain European politician who had big ideas. He had the right ideas, but went after the wrong groups. Scientology is a plague and it needs to be exterminated.”
Fortune 100 companies immediately pulled their advertising and apologized to STAND upon learning they were sponsoring anti-Scientology hate on iHeart Radio:
- “The ad had been placed inadvertently by one of our marketing agencies. They have corrected the mistake.”
- “We don’t condone, let alone sponsor hate in any form. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.”
- “[We have] no intention of targeting advertisements to anti-Scientology audiences.”
- “We reminded our media agency to follow our guidelines which would avoid placement on controversial programming including this particular podcast.”
- “If you see our sponsorship on this program again, please email me the specifics so we can address the error by our agency.”
- “Our ad did run during this program by mistake. We pulled the spots from the podcast.”
Consequently, for more than four weeks, new episodes of iHeart’s hate podcast have aired with no commercial advertising.
Scientologists are shocked and outraged Bob Pittman continues to go out of his way to violate iHeart policy and stream content that dehumanizes them based on their religion—even while the podcast earns iHeart nothing but a record of condoning hate.
