Putting pressure on Fox News through their sponsors
by Matthew Hubbard
Link to ArticleEleven months ago, it was a disgruntled unemployed 58 year old man shooting up a Unitarian church, hoping to kill as many liberals as he could, since killing all the people in Bernard Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America wasn't feasible.Then it was a 51 year old man shooting Dr. George Tiller, known as 'Tiller the Baby Killer' to the anti-abortion crowd, a title repeated on Bill O'Reilly's show dozens of times in the past few years. Most recently, an 88 year old white supremacist kills a security guard at the Holocaust Museum. What these criminals have in common, besides a Y chromosome, general ethnicity and advanced age for murderous mayhem is being immersed in a world view that is becoming more incensed as time goes by, ratcheting up the hyperbole and fear. Talk of revolution to destroy tyranny is standard, and 'getting rid' of the problems they think the nation faces becomes the only way to save their way of life.On TV, the major source of this kind of rhetoric is the Fox News Channel, though if you watch the less popular CNBC business channel, you can get nearly as much right wing drivel. I'm not alone in sensing this inflation of the sensational and violent rhetoric. Shepard Smith, who is something akin to the conscience of Fox News, sees the increased anger in the e-mails he reads and it worries him. Camille Paglia, the self-described feminist who tried to convince us that Madonna was a good thing a few decades back, is a regular listener to talk radio and wrote in Salon about her observations of the ratcheting up of violence as comedy over the past few months. I don't want to silence the voices of the right. If they can be silenced, so can we, and I certainly don't want that. I want people on the air turning away from the crazy. Not wishing people dead, not making comparisons to Nazis and other murderous regimes, not feeding the anger of unstable people who are listening and near the brink. We can't rely on the public spirit and love of rationality of industrialists like Rupert Murdoch, but we can put pressure on the people who advertise on Fox News by boycotting their products. Here is a list of regular advertisers on that channel. Crest Whitestrips
Delphi
Mercedes Benz
Comcast
Subaru
GMC Suv's
Best Buy
Travelocity
Capzasin
New Phase
Orbitz
Ditech.com
eloan.com
Dawn
Toyota
Centrum
Nextel
Vehix.com
Gold Bond
Aspercreme
webmd.com
American Express
Holiday Inn Express
M Professional
priceline.com If you want the airwaves to be more responsible and to stop feeding the murderous rage of unbalanced people, it's time to stop patronizing these businesses, and more importantly, to tell these businesses why. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. If you have accounts on these bookmarking sites, you can post this story to share it with others.
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