Liberal media boycotts are terrible Wildmon legacy                            

Advertiser-aimed boycotts, fomented that conservatives like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Gavin McInnes can be silenced, are reprehensible for several solid reasons. 

One is that they represent an anti-intellectual impulse. Diverse perspectives are strangled away. Open discussion conducive to problem solving and due public conversation visibility are forestalled.

Another reason is that, regardless of boycott participants' supposed motives, they inflict suffering on average people. These rank-and-file workers do not necessarily share views to which boycotters object. They just want to pay bills and provide for their families. Boycotts hinder those legitimate aims.

The third reason? Current campaigns against media advertisers are inconsistent with sound, classical liberal thinking about open expression and advertiser pressuring.

In 1990, Burger King was the target of blue-nosed boycotters on the Right. Seeking to settle the situation, the corporation asserted in several hundred newspaper ads that it wished "to go on record as supporting traditional American values on television."

An 11/07/1990 New York Times article ("Burger King Ads Help End Boycott By Religious Group") addressed the effort. It had been launched by Clear-TV,  run by the Rev. Donald Wildmon. 

Like those who now protest conservative voices, the private group was pressuring advertisers in the hope that racy content it found objectionable would be banished from public airwaves and hence rendered inaccessible to everyone.

As the Times noted, in a passage sadly relevant today, the "skirmish" illustrated that "large corporations are quick to respond to even a flicker of consumer protest to keep from losing any potential sales."

"This is unbelievable," said Jeff Cohen, executive director of liberal media group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. "It's the equivalent of a loyalty oath. A major corporation takes out a major advertisement in a national newspaper to say nothing except the magic code words to assuage these interest groups."

Some nine years earlier, Wildmon-the-boycotter was profiled in People ("Advertisers Run for Cover as Tv Vigilante Donald Wildmon Decides It's Prime Time for a Boycott.")

"This is an effort of the Moral Majority to force its will on the real majority," CBS senior Vice President for Policy Gene Mater told the magazine. "We look upon it as the greatest frontal assault on intellectual freedom this country has ever faced."

In a statement today echoed by Media Matters re Fox News, Wildmon said of one new CBS program: "We will write down who the sponsors of that show are. It won't be on long."

The People article noted that Wildmon's efforts against free expression prompted Norman Lear and others to form People For the American Way. 

"Most Americans believe in the Jeffersonian concept of the free marketplace of ideas," said PFAW's Greg Denier. "Wildmon thinks the first amendment means that only people who have the 'truth' are free to express it."

"It's the Wizard of Oz strategy," Denier added. "Stir up a lot of fire and smoke to intimidate people."

This is a different age than the one in which the Wildmons sought to control media speech and liberals decried the ambition. It is a moment of anti-Trump mania in which fine principles once harbored are heaved through the nearest window.

Liberals used to understand the importance of untrammeled expression. They wrote impassioned essays supporting unpopular speakers and waged landmark courtroom battles to protect the right to advocate controversial ideas.

But admirable principles were cast aside when the Trump campaign began its barnstorming. Anything and everything were acceptable to media and political elites, so long as establishment interests were served. 

The end justified the means.

Nevermind that, shorn of its specifics, it was the identical tactic. Whether organized back then by Wildmon or by Democrats today, pressuring media advertisers with the hope of constraining speech stinks.

Long-hailed stalwarts Clarence Darrow, Roger Baldwin, William O. Douglas, Lenny Bruce, Nat Hentoff, George Carlin, and Norman Lear were replaced by a new and philosophically distasteful left model that cared about nothing apart from totalitarian enforcement of politically correct values and power acquisition.

"How liberal activists harnessed social media to target Fox News' Tucker Carlson" was the CNN.com headline over a piece cheering Wildmon-style advertiser-pressuring now practiced by today's doggedly intolerant forces of tolerance.

CNN writer Fredreka Schouten noted uncritically that "independent journalist" Judd Legum posts online 'go get 'em' listings of Carlson's advertisers. 

According to Schouten, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone "has worked behind the scenes to encourage advertisers to walk away from some Fox News programming..."

The Wildmon legacy endures. It now sports 'woke' raiment.