Rich Polk/Getty Images for Politicon Fourth Estate Stop the Stupid Tucker Carlson Boycott Advertisers should be independent of journalists, and not just the other way around.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

By now you’ve heard that the boycott brigade has come for Tucker Carlson, demanding that the advertisers of his nightly Fox News Channel show dump him from their budgets for saying immigrants make the United States “poorer and dirtier.” With partisan watchdogs Media Matters for America and Sleeping Giants leading the charge, the campaign has persuaded at least 17 major advertisers to bail, including Jaguar Land Rover, Pacific Life Insurance and IHOP, according to a fresh count by the Hollywood Reporter’s Jeremy Barr.

You might not like Carlson’s show—I certainly don’t—and wish for it an immediate, shallow grave in the TV-show boneyard. His retrograde views on race, minorities, gays and women and his demagogic demeanor give me great pleasure to turn the dial whenever he pops up on my tube. In that sense, I’ve been boycotting Carlson’s Fox show pretty much as long as it’s been running.


But as much as the Carlson show pains me, the calls by activists for an advertiser boycott pain me more. As I wrote in 2017 when Fox’s Bill O’Reilly faced similar calls for an advertiser boycott, I’m made queasy by crusades that charge corporate advertisers with the power to decide what ideas should be discussed and how they should be discussed. Seriously, I barely trust IHOP to make my breakfast. Why would I expect it to vet my cable news content for me?

I’ve been watching TV news and reading newspapers and magazines for a lifetime. The notion that an advertisement should constitute an automatic endorsement of a program or news article comes as a novel argument to me. My understanding has always been that advertisers buy space because they want to attract the attention of the eyes and ears drawn in by news. If we’re going to interpret ads as forms of validation for content the ads are adjacent to, does that mean Staples and Comcast, both of which advertised in today’s Washington Post, endorse the Post’s news coverage and opinion columns, or that Bloomingdale’s and Johnson & Johnson approve of the editorial drift of the New York Times because they just took out full-page ads? Not in my media universe.

Ideally, journalists are independent of the companies that buy the advertisements adjacent to their copy. But then advertisers are independent, too—of the journalists whose pages and minutes they subsidize with ads. The boycotters don’t see that independence. An ad, for them, is an act of agreement with content. Without boarding the slippery slope, we can see the media wreckage that will follow such a viewpoint should it become ascendant. Advertisers tend to be timid, overreactive, running from controversy and conflict, and in times of perceived crisis, their timidity spreads to publishers, which is bad for journalism. It’s easy to imagine today’s boycotts turning into tomorrow’s blacklist. Students of the McCarthyite 1950s can tell you all you want to know about the hundreds of blacklisted performers and entertainers who were barred from work for years because of their political transgressions.

Both good journalism and bad journalism create controversy. But it’s always a mistake to stamp out controversy with a censor’s heel. Nate Silver put it better than I can in a Tuesday evening tweet: “The logical endpoint of deeming advertisers to have endorsed the political messages of the shows they run ads on is that only milquetoast both- sidesism with a pro-corporate bent will be advertising-supported, if any political content is ad-supported at all.” Silver’s view is informed by his memory of the time when conservative groups urged boycotts of advertisers and network thought to be promoting LGBTQ or other “nontraditional” lifestyles.

Are boycotts never warranted? Media scholar Michael Socolow of the University of Maine says he backs boycotts that punish the producers and advertisers for their actions. “But when you boycott advertisers to punish networks/programming, you’re actually punishing consumers of information and damaging the public sphere,” Socolow says.

“I have always believed in the marketplace of ideas,” Young Turks broadcaster Cenk Uygur said on Tuesday of the advertiser boycott. “I think the advertisers should not pull out of Tucker Carlson’s show. You could just say, ‘Hey, just stop watching the show’ … let the audience make that decision.” (And I thought I would never agree with anything Uygur said!)

So if you hate Carlson’s show, send letters of protest to Fox. Sign petitions protesting his show. Picket Fox headquarters. Cancel your cable TV package. Compose critiques of his show and spread them wide and far. Start a GoFundMe to finance the placement of advertisements protesting his show! Stage a rally! Start a parade! Urge your friends and acquaintances to join your cause!

But please keep your hands off of Carlson’s advertisers. In the long run, you’ll be hurting only yourself.

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I lifted my boycott of Tucker Carlson’s show briefly in 2017 so I could write this piece about him. Boycott me by not sending email to [email protected]. My email alerts think my Twitter feed is poor and dirty. My RSS feed boycotts everything.