Putting Pressure on Advertisers

Laura Ingraham, a typically horrible right-wing Fox television host, expressed glee when David Hogg, a Parkland student who has become an outspoken gun control proponent, was rejected by UCLA. Hogg responded by urging his supporters to contact Ingraham's advertisers and pressure them to drop her. (I did so.)

Ingraham has now apologized, but advertisers continue to drop her show. This brings up tricky questions about how this kind of pressure is supposed to work, and how it can best be deployed.

There are two key points here. The first is that advertisers actually make two relevant decisions: the choice of whether to advertise on a particular show in the first place, and then the choice whether to withdraw advertising (usually under pressure). Lowe's famously pulled advertising for "All-American Muslim," which had come under fire for its positive portrayal of Muslims. The difficulty is that one wants to punish Lowe's for giving in to bigotry, but on the other hand, what about all the advertisers who were never willing to advertise on "All-American Muslim" to begin with? Are we really going to direct our business to them? (Maybe.)

This ties in to the second point, which is that once an advertiser has been burned by its association with a show, it is not in a good position to adjudicate the resolution of the particular dispute that has inflamed passions. Partly that's because these disputes tend to be complicated and to be perceived very differently by people with different ideologies (all of whom the advertiser may see as potential customers). But on top of that, a show that becomes controversial once is likely to be a repeat offender. By celebrating a personal setback for a teenager, Ingraham revealed something about herself that is unlikely to change once we've moved on from this controversy.

Anyway these dynamics are at play in all of these cases, and they bear thinking about. None of this means that we shouldn't hold advertisers accountable for their decisions (as I mentioned, I contacted one of Ingraham's advertisers after I saw what had happened), but you can be misled if you look at an advertiser's decision in isolation and ignore the broader context.