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MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has spent tens of millions of dollars on advertisements on Fox News over the last year and a half, while at the same time he has repeatedly been criticizing the network.
The New York Times reported Thursday that Lindell is the largest individual advertiser on Fox's prime-time lineup, spending nearly $80 million since January of 2021.
Lindell has repeatedly spread false claims that the last presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. He has blasted Fox News for declining to air misinformation about the 2020 election.
In February, for example, he suggested he should get cybersecurity experts to hack Fox News host Sean Hannity's show to broadcast voter fraud claims.
The comments came after Lindell said on an episode of his own online show, The Lindell Report, that he had tried to get Fox News to play a video outlining alleged evidence of voter fraud.
"Run this tape on your show, instead of Sean Hannity," Lindell said. "Maybe we should get our cyber guys that looked at all the evidence to hook up our stream to Fox's," he added.
Last November, despite his advertisements on the network, Lindell called for protests outside of Fox's headquarters in New York City and criticized the network for not covering baseless election fraud claims.
In January, while commenting on the one-year anniversary of Trump being banned on Twitter, Lindell blasted the social media platform and Fox News. Speaking on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, Lindell said the U.S. is "better off" with Trump banned from Twitter.
"Because they had a hidden agenda that we just didn't know how evil they were, Steve," Lindell said when pressed on his opinion. "We didn't know how bad Fox was, we didn't know how bad Twitter was, we didn't know how bad Zuck-a-buck's [Zuckerberg's] Facebook was. It all got revealed," he said.
In July of 2021, he temporarily paused advertising on the network after it declined to run an ad promoting a cyber-symposium that touted 2020 election fraud claims.
Newsweek has reached out to Lindell and Fox News for comment.
Last month, Lindell's phone was seized by the FBI, and the CEO said he would sue the agency over the move. In an interview with Newsweek at the time, Lindell denied wrongdoing and said that MyPillow lost business following the FBI's actions.
"There was four products that got canceled. Four different people because they're afraid of what the FBI did," Lindell said in September.
About the writer
Xander Landen is a Newsweek weekend reporter. His focus is often U.S. politics, but he frequently covers other issues including ... Read more