More advertisers bail out of Duggar show

As the TLC network ponders the future of the damaged Duggar family's reality show, more advertisers are deciding for themselves: They're out.

Meanwhile, pressure on social media to cancel the show outright is mounting.

Payless ShoeSource and Choice Hotels tweet-announced Tuesday they are pulling their ads from the top-rated 19 Kids and Counting show in the wake of last week's scandalous revelations about eldest son Josh Duggar's past molesting of underage girls.

In response to tweets from concerned customers, Payless said it was planning to remove its ads from whatever survives of the Duggar show in the future.

Choice Hotels did the same.

Walgreens, also under pressure from customers on social media, might follow: It said on its Facebook page it is continuing to "monitor" the Duggar scandal.

Food giant General Mills last week said it would pull its ads from the show, shortly after Josh Duggar confessed to "inexcusable" behavior, and his pious parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, acknowledged knowing about it and ensuring Josh never was prosecuted for it.

TLC already has pulled reruns of the show from its schedule but still is considering whether to cancel the show altogether. Currently, the show is not in production.

TLC did not respond to requests for comment about the Duggar scandal's impact on advertising. The network has issued only one official statement, saying it was "deeply saddened and troubled by this heartbreaking situation."

The network is getting conflicting advice on Change.org: One petition calls on TLC and its parent company, Discovery, to cancel the show, but a new one appeared Tuesday seeking to save it. It has 22 signatures so far, but an earlier save-the-show petition has more than 13,000 signatures.

Still, the majority of people speaking out on the petition website, not to mention on Twitter and Facebook and in unscientific man-on-the-street polls on MSNBC, want the show to be history, right now.

19 Kids has been under fire since last year, when a Change.org petition gathered nearly 195,000 signatures to end what it called "fear mongering" by the Duggars against gay people.

The family is as famous for its status in the culture wars as it is for its fecundity. But its alliance with conservatives causes — Josh Duggar was a Washington lobbyist against gay marriage before he hurriedly resigned last week — has brought criticism along with fame.

When Michelle Duggar joined a campaign against transgender restroom rights in Fayetteville, Ark., last year, suggesting trans people are "child predators," it sparked the first cancel-the-show petitions.

So when Josh Duggar's past spilled out last week, the angry tweets about "hypocrisy" spilled out, too.