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By JACK SHAFER
Right On!
(Love the IHOP reference!)
The blacklist is already here insomuch as the mob demands that those slayed in this Purity Panic stay unemployed with no "platform".
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/12/19/stop-the-stupid-tucker-carlson-boycott-223387But as much as the Carlson show pains me, the calls by activists for an advertiser boycott pain me more. As I wrote in 2017 when Fox’s Bill O’Reilly faced similar calls for an advertiser boycott, I’m made queasy by crusades that charge corporate advertisers with the power to decide what ideas should be discussed and how they should be discussed. Seriously, I barely trust IHOP to make my breakfast. Why would I expect it to vet my cable news content for me?
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Ideally, journalists are independent of the companies that buy the advertisements adjacent to their copy. But then advertisers are independent, too—of the journalists whose pages and minutes they subsidize with ads. The boycotters don’t see that independence. An ad, for them, is an act of agreement with content. Without boarding the slippery slope, we can see the media wreckage that will follow such a viewpoint should it become ascendant. Advertisers tend to be timid, overreactive, running from controversy and conflict, and in times of perceived crisis, their timidity spreads to publishers, which is bad for journalism. It’s easy to imagine today’s boycotts turning into tomorrow’s blacklist. Students of the McCarthyite 1950s can tell you all you want to know about the hundreds of blacklisted performers and entertainers who were barred from work for years because of their political transgressions
Right On!
(Love the IHOP reference!)
The blacklist is already here insomuch as the mob demands that those slayed in this Purity Panic stay unemployed with no "platform".