Let’s say you have people calling for boycott against sponsors of a controversial show.
And let’s say you have people calling for a boycott against the sponsors who decide to pull support from the same program.
I think people have the right to call for a boycott for whatever reason they want. I think a boycott can be an effective tool when it is well-orchestrated.
But I don’t think the two boycotts are equivalent. The messaging is kind of fucked up for one of them, IMHO. One side is saying “If you fund speech we find offensive, we will patronize businesses that don’t do that.” The other side is saying, “If you don’t continue to fund speech we agree with, we won’t give you money.” The “continue” is important. They aren’t boycotting all the hundreds of thousands of businesses that never had any ties to the program. They are only boycotting the few that did, but no longer do. And that’s where it’s kind of fucked up, IMHO. “Keep giving me and my friends money or I’ll tell everyone to stay away from you” isn’t a very nice message. It sounds like extortion. But I can see the reasonableness of “If you want to associate with a jerk, go ahead. But I’ll tell everyone to stay away from you.”
I’m curious if I’m the only one who feels like these aren’t equivalent forms of protest. Seems to me one is reasonable, while the other isn’t. But I am open to other arguments.
Kinda depends on why they stopped. In this case, I think the premise is reasonable: they’re boycotting those sponsors not just because they’ve decided to stop doing business with someone, but because they’ve decided to stop doing business with them over a particular issue. That is, in itself, a message: the advertisers that pull their adds from Hannity’s show are sending a specific message, so the people boycotting them have a perfectly valid reason to respond. It’s completely different than if the advertisers’ contracts simply expired and they decided not to renew simply because they weren’t getting enough bang for their buck in advertising or something like that.
So it’s not so much “If you don’t continue to fund speech we agree with, we won’t give you money.” as it is, “if you explicitly make a point of disagreeing with this speech we agree with and stop funding it because of that, we won’t give you money”.
I get all of that. But it seem kinda weird that they’d boycott a business that was once a sponsor, but not call a boycott against other businesses that have never been sponsors and may even support the “opposition”.
Let’s say I am huge fan of a local Little League team. Let’s say a local pizzeria sponsors the team. None of the other restaurants in the area want to be sponsors. One day the pizzeria owner and the team coach have a disagreement over something and the former decides to terminate his financial support.
What does me calling a boycott against this business accomplish? I can understand leading an anti-boycott–encouraging people to patronize another pizzeria that has now agreed to sponsor the team. But telling people to not shop at the other pizzeria doesn’t push the goals of the team. Indeed, it just makes the team look bad so that no one will ever want to sponsor it.
I agree with your OP. They are very different qualitatively.
In the real world there are three factions. Us, Them, and neutral. Particularly in matters of business or sponsorship, neutral is the vast, vast majority whereas Us & Them are rounding errors.
The “boycott the sponsors pulling their ads” amounts to saying “There’s Us, and everyone else. You’re either fully supportive of Us or you’re the Enemy”.
It amounts to redefining the neutrals into the enemy camp.
It’s totally part & parcel of a hyperpartisan “life is nothing but a team t-shirt” mentality. To say it’s unhelpful to democratic civilized society is the understatement of the decade.
Reminds me of Planned Parenthood and Komen. PP ripped Komen for *stopping *support, while *not *ripping thousands of other entities who never gave to PP to begin with.
I think it comes from the sense of betrayal. There was an (implied) agreement that the fans would buy pizza if the pizzeria funded the team. Now, you’ve got a lot of people saying, “Hey, I bought your crappy pizza for years, instead of the good stuff from That Other Pizzeria, and now you’re pulling out? Well, you’ll never see another dime from me!”
… it comes from the sense of betrayal. There was an (implied) agreement that the fans would buy pizza if the pizzeria funded the team. Now, you’ve got a lot of people saying, "Hey, I bought your good pizza for years, and now I have to switch to the crappy stuff from That Other Pizzeria. You made me do it! Waah!"It’s still indignation, but now it’s at least as much self-inflicted recreational outrage as it is principled objection.
Whether it’s Coke vs. Pepsi, Ford vs. Dodge pick-ups, or Budweiser vs. Miller, the products aren’t that different. Yeah, individual folks have individual preferences, but they add up to collective indifference. In the case of sponsorship by national brands, we ought to see roughly as many folks expressing your proposed sentiment as mine.
Think of it as an acrimonious breakup. If Bob and Alice date each other, and then have a nasty breakup, they’ll likely hate each other more than they’d hate a random stranger who never had a relationship with them.
If Alice’s friends went around town telling everyone not to date Bob just because he broke up with her, wouldn’t you think badly of them (as well as Alice, since she’s associated with them)?
In contrast, if Bob was friends with a serial killer, I wouldn’t have a problem with Alice telling everyone to stay away from him.
I agree with the OP that they aren’t exactly same. But I can’t say it’s always ethically wrong to boycott in the manner Hannity is promoting; these things have to be judged on their own merits. (And I think Hannity’s rationale in this instance is indefensible.)
Here’s a hypothetical to show a defensible case. Let’s pretend a comedian hosts a popular late night show. One day he announces he’s gay and its a surprise given that he’s always presented as straight. In response to this announcement, three corporate sponsors withdraw support for the show, stating that they disagree with the “transgressive direction” the show is going.
Is it wrong to boycott these corporations? Not necessarily for withdrawing support, but for making a statement that justifies homophobia? I say it’s fair game.
To go back to Hannity, on a practical level, by withdrawing their ads, these businesses are already saying they consider the loss of customers as an acceptable tradeoff to them, at least in the short-term. So it’s doubtful to me that Hannity’s call for boycott will result in anything except him looking even more petulant and ineffectual than he already does.
Hannity isn’t promoting a boycott; Hannity fans are. Keurig is still a Fox News sponsor; it just doesn’t want its ads airing during Hannity’s time slot. Hannity would be out on his ass if he was the one telling people to boycott their products.
I get that objectively there shouldn’t be a difference between a sponsor pulling its ad and a sponsor never airing an ad in the first place, but this sort of thing doesn’t work with objective analysis. Objectively, we’d just buy the best-value coffee machine and not care too much about what time slots its ads aired in.
The 500 he buys are piddling. If in the smashing he encourages 100,000 of his fans to smash the ones they already own or to never buy one, now he’s done something.
The important thing with any celebrity is not what he/she does directly, but what he she causes his/her fans to do. That’s called leverage.
I agree with RNATB’s point that Hannity aiding and abetting a boycott of his former sponsors may be tactically powerful but will be strategically Phhyric. He’s going to have a very hard time attracting any sponsors of any kind going forward. Except perhaps the most rabidly pro-Hannity or pro-Hannity’s followers. All guns-and-ammo all the time maybe?