There’s an interesting boycott war going on out there right now, all over Glenn Beck. It all started (I believe) with this video.
Apparently it has had some success as some advertisers are pulling out of the Beck program, because many people are offended by the guy or something. These offended people set up other websites to push the boycott.
This has lead to other groups and websites, like defendglenn.com to get involved and promise to boycott any advertiser that caves in and removes their advertising from the Beck program.
So what is an advertiser to do? Seems like they can’t win no matter what they do. No matter what they are going to lose customers by advertising on these programs instead of gaining customers.
The answer is simple. Any sane advertiser will simply stay away from anything remotely controversial in the first place and hence we’ll all end up with boring mushy non-controversial programming. I think the entire “boycott because I’m offended” movement is ridiculous. There should be a wall between editorial content and advertising, otherwise the latter will influence the former, and then everyone loses.