Saturday, August 28, 2010


It is time.

When a looney, small-minded, mean-spirited American Fascist desecrates the Lincoln Memorial and the memory of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it is time.

When the loudest voice in modern media profits by spreading lies and hate on a sea of real troubles, it is time.

When a violent rabble pollutes our history and good name as a nation and makes the world think we have lost our way, it is time.

When people who have worked and sacrificed for a lifetime to make this land a better place fear methodical incitement to violence that could destroy their life’s work in an instant, it is time.

When good people hesitate to do anything but write despairing comments and send them into the electronic void, it is time.

It is time for good people to keep evil from triumph by doing more than nothing. It is time to stop this evil juggernaut in its tracks.

Every thinking person knows who is responsible. There is one voice in our nation that brazenly spreads lies, unreason, hatred and intolerance every day, hiding under a false claim of “balance.” It is Fox Demagoguery, which calls itself Fox “News.”

Our First Amendment lets Fox and its brown shirts say what they will. But we don’t have to listen. More to the point, we don’t have to buy.

The Australian immigrant who makes billions undermining our democracy is first of all a businessman. Make his lies unprofitable, and he will stop telling them. He will call off his dogs. That is the purpose of this blog.

We still have a competitive economy. For every product or service advertised on Fox, there are competitors. For those few that may have poor competition, there are substitutes. You can choose. All you have to do is refuse to buy from firms that sponsor evil.

You don’t have to die for your country. You don’t have to fight or bleed for it. You don’t even have to cry or sweat for it. All you have to do is change your buying habits and refuse to support firms that sponsor evil. Your and other good people’s collective economic power will do the rest.

So let’s get started. Let us good Americans do something to keep evil from winning, lest history classify us with good Germans during the 1930s.
THIS BLOG HAS A SINGLE PURPOSE: TO BOYCOTT FOX’S SPONSORS AND BRING FOX TO HEEL.
The method is simple in principle: a nationwide boycott of sponsors of Fox, beginning with those who sponsor the worst offenses.

But execution is the key. The idea of a boycott is far from original. There are already established sites promoting one, including foxnewsboycott.com and boycottfoxsponsors.com.

But the problem is focus. Today, for example, foxnewsboycott.com lists 117 Fox sponsors in just the first half of the alphabet, A through L. No one but a fanatic could remember, let alone boycott, all 117.

If you are cynical, you might suspect that Fox itself, or its PR crew, runs that site. In listing so many sponsors, it seems to proclaim, “You want to boycott us? Good luck! Get ready to boycott a list of some 200 companies, including many household names in American commerce!"

Even if anyone could organize an wide boycott of all of those firms, it wouldn’t have much effect. The sponsors are so many and so widely distributed in the economy that their ad trackers might miss the boycott entirely, thinking it nothing more than the general effect of the second dip of recession into which we are now sliding.

To make an impact, a boycott has to demonstrate focused economic power. It has to show a particular sponsor a “signal” (lost sales) that rises above the noise of general economic turmoil and is clearly associated with an evil attributable to its sponsorship of Fox.

In order to have that effect a boycott must: (1) be publicly announced, (2) target no more than three sponsors, and (3) be in response to a specific event or show. The targeted sponsor(s) should be major advertisers on the event or show, whose sales involve small amounts, and whose products have easy substitutes. Consumer products companies, for example, make better targets than brokerages or car companies, because it takes several days to transfer a brokerage account, and because car buys are rare and important events that consumers might be unwilling or unable to postpone.

With your help, this blog will try identify events, shows and sponsors that can become the focus of targeted boycotts of Fox. We do not want or intend to stifle legitimate political debate, far less encourage a boycott for commercial or competitive reasons. We believe that Beck and Fox have gone so far beyond the bounds of legitimate debate, for so long, as to merit direct economic pressure, since civil criticism and persuasion haven’t seemed to work. If you disagree, feel free to start your own blog to support them, but please don’t complain to us.

What is “legitimate” debate, and what is beyond the pale, we leave for you to decide. If you believe that certain “info-tainers” are habitual spreaders of evil, send us comments identifying the major sponsors of their shows. If you want to discourage only particularly outrageous lies, hate mongering or fear mongering, send us comments identifying them and their sponsors.

A good place to start is with advertisers on Fox’s over-the-top “news” coverage of Glenn Beck’s twisted rally today, desecrating the legacies of Lincoln and Dr. King. To get the ball rolling, we ask readers to propose candidates for boycotts based on coverage of that non-event, by way of comments to this post.

These days many advertisers track responses to their ad campaigns on a real-time basis. Nothing will send a clearer signal to Fox and its ultimate owner, Rupert Murdoch, than a distinct dip in sponsors’ sales following an evil broadcast like today’s.

In sending your comments, whether on today’s rally or future evils, please identify the Fox affiliate (by station call letters) airing the show, provide the date, time, and name of the show, and identify the sponsor and the product or service promoted. If you object to a particular smear or claim, please identify the speaker and provide a quote, paraphrase, or summary of what you saw or heard. If Fox has posted the offending matter on line, or if you have video or audio, please send us a file or a link.

We will post comments that we can verify to our satisfaction. From time to time, we will collect your proposals in posts on this blog, recommending specific boycott triggers and targets, in response to particular evils like today’s. We hope you will give this blog the widest possible exposure, by sending links to your family, friends and like-minded acquaintances. If boycotts of Fox sponsors are to work, they must be focused and targeted. Vain attempts to boycott all of Fox’s many sponsors will do no good.

If you have been following Fox for similar purposes, such as fact-checking, lie debunking, etc., we would appreciate a summary of your findings, or a link and recommendation for major sponsors to boycott. We will post all such notices after we have had a chance to check their source, authenticity and accuracy.

All comments that you send will be moderated. We will post only those that are brief, describe the sponsorship of evil specifically enough for us to verify it, and contain no commercial or other political content. We will not post any comments with ads or commercial links, however indirect or subtle, so please don’t send us spam.

Remember, this blog has a single, simple purpose: to promote focused, timely boycotts of major sponsors of evil on Fox, which are narrow enough to have an immediate and measureable adverse effect on the offending sponsors’ revenue. Business lives and dies by quarterly reports these days. So we hope and expect that a boycott causing a sharp drop in quarterly revenue will get management’s attention. In most cases a longer boycott will not be necessary.





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