MURDOCH US newspapers racist boycott

He closed the flagship NotW after a highly effective advertiser boycott threatened to spread to his US media (and with the PCC so disgraced by its mishandling of the Murdoch press' phone-hacking, condemning The Guardian for reporting it, that it disbanded itself! Some press regulator...).

Now Murdoch faces a potentially crippling boycott of his paper that once again shows how pressure from outside the formal press regulators can be much more effective than the regulators themselves.

The S*n has long been banned across Merseyside for its hateful portrayal of Liverpool fans as drunken hooligans responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 Liverpool fans at Hillsborough, eventually apologising for this decades later after official public enquiries trashed it's claims.

Now it's an unsubtle attack by the New York Post that has attracted a retail boycott. Up to 5000 Yemeni-owned outlets will cease selling the paper after what they see as a clearly racist front page attacking 1 of the just 2 Muslim Congresspersons. They say it endangers US Muslims by encouraging anti-Islam hatred.

KEY POINT: Consumer campaigns, especially pressurising advertisers with boycott threats, + distributor/retailer boycotts can be much more effective than a formal regulator.

Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar.

CHOMSKY ADVERTISER FILTER Stop Funding Hate D Mail campaign

FEB 2018 UPDATE: The campaign continues to have traction, an interesting reversal of the history of left-wing papers struggling to gain advertising. Not that we can say the Mail is struggling yet, other than with the general disruption of digitisation, with the online migration of advertising.
The campaign got multiple replies from advertisers pledging to cease placing ads in the Mail after tweeting about a Richard Littlejohn column condemning two gay dads, including celebrity swimmer Tom Daley.

Guardian: Center Parcs pulls Daily Mail ads after column against same-sex parents.

SFH aims to reduce what it sees as the baleful, malevolent influence over UK democracy (such as it is) and public opinion by pressuring advertisers with potential boycotts.

Peter Preston here recalls how left-wing reportage was discouraged through government encouraging advertisers to withdraw from newspapers that were critical of government 'defence' (ie, war!) policy, specifically the Suez crisis.

He develops a valid point - though once more here we can see the potential for social media and we media to have a greater impact on the poor practices of the press industry than the self-reliant IPSO.

Guardian: Bullying Paperchase and the Mail’s other advertisers just hurts everyone.

ADVERTISER BOYCOTT pressurises Breitbart home of alt-right

Yet another example of why Chomsky was correct to include advertisers as one of the five filters in the propaganda model.

Steve Bannon is back at Breitbart. But can his page of rage survive an ad boycott? 

WEB 2.0 Crowdfunded StopFundingHate targets tabloid advertisers

Once again, we see alternatives to formal regulators springing up.

Chomsky recognised the power of advertisers, one of the five filters in his propaganda model; Curran and Seaton argue that the government encouraged press industry reliance on ad revenue to ensure that radical papers would struggle; the NoTW was closed by Murdoch when advertiser boycotts were organised online and major advertisers began to announce they'd cease paying for ads in the paper (he feared this would widen to the Sun/Times and Sky), while the Times in the 60s changed their editorial policy to be more right-wing, and alienate the new swathe of working class readers they picked up (advertisers refused to pay any extra for these new readers); Facebook and Google refused to consider any action on racist and other right-wing ads until a threatened advertiser boycott ...

Like Hacked Off, this is a citizen pressure group, making use of new media to push their agenda, including crowdfunding to launch the campaign:








Crowdfunder link.