Posted on 04/21/2011 9:33:56 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
On Monday, the editor of left-leaning political satire site Wonkette wrote a piece titled "Greatest Living American: A Children’s Treasury of Trig Crap On His Birthday." The piece lampooned what's known as the "cult of Trig," the rabid fans of Sarah Palin's Down Syndrome youngest child, and accused Palin of using her now three-year-old son as a prop.
Needless to say, many readers were offended by Jack Stuef's post and an online movement started to defund Wonkette by targeting its advertisers. The problem is that Wonkette has a lot of contextual ads, creating a headache for brands targeted in the boycott.
Under the Twitter tag #wonkette and #TrigsCrew, tweet after tweet has been demanding that brands including AT&T, FedEx, Coca-Coca, REI, HP and others pull their Wonkette advertising.
The movement was initially sparked by the right-wing Daily Caller and Big Government media writer Derek Hunter. Hunter has even been tweeting some brands' phone numbers.
And the movement has had some success. Conservative blogger Rick Moore tweeted that Coldwell Banker is pulling its ads. Papa John's and Huggies also announced that their ads would be removed. Huggies tweeted ""All -- We do not support the @Wonkette story & have taken action 2 pull r ads, effective immediately. TY 4 bringing this issue to r att'n!" Papa John's also tweeted its intentions.
But much of Wonkette's ads are banner ads served by a contextual ad network, meaning that any one of a huge number of brands could show up on the site, depending on the visitor. So when an activist tweets a demand that calls on FedEx to remove its ad with a link to the piece, most who click on the link will never see the FedEx ad in question. (Hence Hyatt's confused response to Moore via Twitter.)
Will the relentless campaigners keep refreshing Wonkette until every brand removes its ads from the ad network serving Wonkette?
For Wonkette's part, it has retaliated against Papa John's, tweeting to its fans "Boycott Papa Johns, spread the word! (Your waistline, heart and tastebuds will thank you.)"
For what it's worth, Stuef's piece now features an updated "apology," showing that Wonkette is acknowledging poor judgement in using the word "retarded" (a memo that Lady Gaga didn't receive either), while at the same time refusing to back down from the core criticism of the piece:
"UPDATE: I regret this post and using the word “retarded” in a reference to Sarah Palin’s child. It’s not nice, and is not necessary, but I take responsibility for writing it. For those who came and are offended by this post: I’m sorry, of course. But I stand by my criticism of Sarah Palin using her child as a political prop."
With the increasingly polarized and uncivil nature of political discourse, Wonkette will certainly retain a large portion of its audience. Indeed, its defenders are already pointing to incidents such as Rush Limbaugh's mocking of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease, and the lack of advertiser boycott that followed.
Formerly under the Gawker Media umbrella, Wonkette is now a relatively small site and the loss of top-shelf advertisers will certainly hurt and make the editors reconsider future satire bits involving Palin's children.
Michael J. Fox admitted he went off his meds before that testimony, if I recall correctly. Plus Mr. Fox is a GROWN MAN who can defend himself!
Pretty disgusting, but then most of the left are disgusting. I was forming a great friendship with someone until I learned his leftist leanings and now I won’t even answer his calls.
I must have missed (of course I missed it. I've never heard of Jack
Stuef before) his criticism of "...and my daughter asked me,
'When are you going to plug the leak, Daddy?'"
Or little Amy Carter giving her dad advice on nuclear weapons, or Chelsea Clinton jet-setting all over the world, or....
So, Funkette is a major hypocrite! Why did she have a product that, in her opinion du jour, is hazardous to peoples health advertised on her site in the first place?
I thought money and business isn't supposed to be priorities in the sick Communists' minds.
That'll be good for future business. If you advertise on our site and then stop, we'll encourage our readers to boycott you. Brilliant!
Geez, correction:
peoples health -———> people’s health
I thought money and business isn’t ————> I thought money and business aren’t
‘sawright! The urgency of the response will do that to ya. I know this.
Michael J. Fox is an adult who injected himself into a contraversy. The same cannot be said of Trig. Rush was criticized for imitating Fox’ involuntary swaying, something that could be seen on the RushCam but not heard on the broadcast. I think Rush was just unconsciously getting “in character”. He claims that he did not mean to belittle or mock Fox’ physical condition or his disease and I believe him. Unlike Wonkette.
The only people obsessed with Trig are kooks like Andrew Sullivan who argue that Sarah Palin is not really Trig's birth mother and left-wing ghouls who mock Trig for his Down's Syndrome. (Pro-"choice" liberals think all babies with Down Syndrome should be aborted.)
Conservatives only respond to these barbaric assaults on a baby from the Left. If liberals stopped bringing up Trig then conservatives would almost never mention him.
That’s ok they won’t iss the small number of people on the left who actually buy things.I’ll be sure to make sure we buy from them over the next week so they won’t lose any money.
Rush didn’t know Michael Fox had Parkinsons’s. He saw him swaying on tv and thought he had a psychological problem. He was wrong and apologized for it. No comparison to brutalizing a sweet little boy.
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