After my last post on O'Reilly's thuggery toward Amanda Terkel, I signed up for the facebook group "I Stand with Amanda Terkel." Today, I got an email from the group about organizing a boycott of companies that advertise on O'Reilly's show.
This is a time-tested right-wing ploy, which gets pulled out every time there's something objectionable (read: liberal) on television. A few years back they were able to kill a TV biopic about Reagan that was insufficiently deferential. I realize this works, but I have some qualms about it.
A boycott is a serious measure- it seeks to silence the boycotted show instead of engaging and defeating its ideas. It's a viable tool when the ideas that we seek to silence are so atrocious, like Nazism or something, sure- let's boycott.
O'Reilly is undisputably a thug, a bully, a liar and a shill for the right wing. However, out of all of these things, isn't this boycott really being proposed for the last of those reasons? If it were a left-wing host hassling people, would we on the left really care? I think it's right to make a stand against O'Reilly's incivility, but to the extent that his actions are not bad enough that they would trigger a progressive boycott if they were on a left-wing or neutral show, then that means that really, we're boycotting because a right-wing jerk, not just because he's a jerk.
The problem, endemic to the left, is that the GOP doesn't hesitate to use tactics like these to shut down or marginalize our point of view. Also, taking the moral high-ground here does in fact have real-world consequences, in that more people are influenced by right-wing media, and consequently more right-wingers are elected and more right-wing, bad policies are enacted. How high is the price of the high-ground?
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