I think some are local, some are gone for a long time, and some are just pulled out of thin air to make themselves look like they are winning.
However, it sure doesn’t hurt for companies like Netflix to understand what would happen should they join this nonsense.
I just had a long conversation with a Netflix customer service rep. Her initial canned response was that Netflix doesn’t advertise with Rush in the first place, because their policy is to stay politically neutral in all things (including ad placements). I told her I was looking right at a Media Matters webpage which claimed that Netflix had dropped Rush just today - and shouldn’t they be concerned about such blatant misstatements about their company? I further told her that it was starting to go viral all over the internet that Netflix has dropped Rush, and that 20 million Rush listeners would be canceling the instant they heard this. She told me they’d been blasted with calls since yesterday (mostly asking them to “stand with women,”) and that their PR people were working up an answer to make public. She repeated that Netflix was very neutral politically and I responded that if they keep it that way in their response to the public this would all blow over for them. If not...have a look at Carbonite’s stock price today for a glimpse of the future.
Conversation over, right? Wrong. She then said that as a woman she really had a problem with what Rush had said! I explained how this whole thing was a set-up and I walked her through every bit of the timeline, starting with Obama’s dictatorial “healthcare” mandate to religious organizations, followed by the fake “hearing” featuring the Leftist activist, Ms. Fluke, and concluding with the manufactured “firestorm” with which we’re all now embroiled. She argued with me (nicely - and I was nice too) every step of the way that this was all about women’s health. I took the last word by pointing out that for a huge bulk of their customers, the issue was First Amendment freedoms and the (still) largely conservative principals of this country - which means, for Netflix...this is really about customer retention.
In the course of our conversation, she gave me the email to their PR department: pr@netflix.com. Contact them.
It’s surreal to be having conversations like this with vendors. It really is...