Thread by @docrussjackson

A short #THREAD on RIGHT-WING BOYCOTTS OF TV CHANNELS & other media, companies & brands in the US.

It's based on Terrence Witkowski's 'Broadening Anti-Consumption Research: A History of Right-Wing Prohibitions, Boycotts, & Resistance to Sustainability'.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

The wider article seeks to broaden the scholarship field of anti-consumption research through a historical counternarrative illustrating right-wing prohibitions, boycotts of media content, brands, and companies, and, most recently, resistance to sustainable consumption.

Manifestations of anti-consumption include boycotts & consumer resistance, brand avoidance, culture jamming & more, often motivated by concerns over environmental sustainability, consuming ethically, materialistic values, or opposition to corporations & capitalism more generally.

Existing research tends to explore the actions of the global political Left, & the activities of the political Right/conservatives simply have been largely overlooked.

This #THREAD looks only at a few examples of right-wing boycotts in the USA.

The legal suppression of media content - or 'cancel culture' as many call it now - based on right-wing moral & political grounds goes far back into American history. These bans have relied upon the often heavy-handed deployment of state power.

Media boycotts, in contrast, have leveraged public opinion, the marketplace, & buyer behavior rather than government dictates to reduce & redirect consumption & so pressure businesses (Friedman 1999).

These forms of anti-consumption are connected: boycott organizers in most cases would have welcomed prohibition of content had it been feasible.

In 1933, a call for movie boycotts by the newly formed Legion of Decency (aka Catholic Legion of Decency) gained widespread notice.

Since the first kinetoscopes in the late 1890s, where viewers could watch sexy moving pictures through peepholes, religious leaders had protested what they saw as brazen indecency in popular cinema. By the 1930s some films had become perceived as quite racy & violent.

Rather loosely organized, the Legion of Decency asked Catholic parishioners to sign a pledge to “remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality”.

In theory, watching a condemned screening could be a mortal sin.

The Legion aimed to enlist half of the then 20 million US Catholics, & by 1934 claimed to have two million members.

Fearing the boycott could reduce audiences & invite new federal laws, the studios censored themselves through the Motion Picture Production Code, aka “Hays Code.”

Early TV also conformed to the Hays Code. Among the curious standards, married couples like Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz could only be shown sleeping in twin beds. By the late 1960s, however, society had moved on & content creators & their sponsors abandoned the Production Code.

As broadcasting in the 1970s began reflecting changing sexual & cultural mores, a new generation of right-wingers became alarmed. Groups affiliated with the Catholic Church protested vehemently when the title character in the sitcom, Maude, had an abortion in 1973.

Several religious organizations objected when Soap, a parody of daytime soap operas, featured a gay continuing character in 1977, the first on prime time.

In 1977, Reverend Donald Wildmon formed the National Federation for Decency – renamed the American Family Association in 88.

Like Mary Whitehouse's National Viwers & Listeners Association in Britian, the National Federation for Decency existed to combat excessive sex, violence, & coarseness on television. "Immoral comedies", shows like Charlie’s Angels & Three’s Company, annoyed Reverend Wildmon.

In 1980, he teamed up with Southern Baptist pastor televangelist, & conservative political commentator Jerry Falwell, to form a new organization called the Coalition for Better Television.

The election of Ronald Reagan suggested that American public opinion had turned Right.

The 'Moral Majority', a coalition or religious & political groups led by Falwell, figured prominently in Reagan’s victory.

Wildmon instructed CBTV volunteers to monitor prime-time shows & threatened boycotts of companies advertising on offensive programs.

#StopFundingHate

Procter & Gamble and other major corporations capitulated to this pressure in 1981 & withdrew advertising from some shows.

Wildmon’s group next turned on the NBC network & its owner, RCA, but boycotts carried out in 1982 appear to have been ineffective.

The American Family Association continued to threaten & carry out boycotts against a number of companies from the 1980s up to the present.

In 1989 Wildman threatened a boycott of Pepsi for showing a commercial starring pop star Madonna performing her song, “Like a Prayer.”

He ordered the boycott because it blended religious symbolism & sexual imagery.

After only two airings, & having paid Madonna $5 million, Pepsi withdrew the ad.

Boycotts are clearly not exclusive to the "woke" Left, & they can be very effective - that's why people use them.

One of the better-known boycott campaigns of the religious right targeted the Walt Disney Company in 1996 for its “gay friendly” policies toward employees & theme park visitors & for broadcasting the comedy series Ellen whose eponymous lead character came out as a lesbian.

Perhaps as a backlash against the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, not to mention the extensive media coverage of transgender people & issues, bathroom use became a hot button issue for right-wingers in 2016 who have called for numerous boycotts.

Other recent calls for company boycotts have channeled right-wing racial, patriotic, & gender concerns. Nike was criticized for an ad campaign launched in 2018 featuring Colin Kaepernick, who in 2016 grabbed national attention when he took a knee during the Star-Spangled Banner.

This was well before the death of George Floyd - as is this article - but Kaepernick was protesting racial inequality & the murder of young Black men by police, but conservatives insisted this was an insult to the American flag & to military personnel.

The Nike print ad riffed on its “Just Do It” slogan by superimposing “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything” on a close-up shot of Kaepernick’s face.

Social media became the vehicle for expressing outrage & calling for a boycott of Nike.

Encouraged by Trump, who tweeted disparaging remarks about Kaepernick & the NFL, some customers posted photos of their Nike apparel being burned or the logo being cut off. Nike sales soared 31% immediately after the ad’s release.

But boycotts by partisans can backfire.

In 2019, Procter & Gamble’s Gillette brand took on the issue of toxic masculinity in a nearly two-minute-long video titled “The Best a Man Can Get.” It addressed bullying & sexual misbehavior among men & visualized how more enlightened males could combat these problems.

A poll found that 61 percent of US adults viewed the ad favorably vs. 17% who did not. Women showed more approval than men, but the biggest difference was between Democrats & Republicans (73% vs. 48% approval).

Right-wingers & culture wars warriors took this as an opportunity to renew their complaints about a “war against men” & quickly attacked the company.

Meanwhile, men’s rights advocates vowed on social media to boycott the brand.

American popular music in the twentieth century elicited additional strains of right-wing, anti-consumption discourse & collective action. By the early 1920s, jazz was reaching a growing audience through live performances & via better recording & phonographic technologies.

RCA Victor released its first jazz record in 1917. The advent of radio broadcasting in the 1920s made listening even easier. Music constituted a high proportion of radio content in the 1920s and much of it was jazz.

Rock & roll followed, which could be played on widely distributed 45 rpm records at home or on jukeboxes & was sometimes seen performed on television shows.

These developments caught the attention of cultural conservatives who lambasted jazz & excoriated rock & roll.

Racism, moral panic, & self-serving business interests & consumer tastes drove the opposition.

Both jazz & rock were essentially African-American creations. Jazz emerged in the early 1900s from Black blues & ragtime & with some help from some white songwriters.

Racism was typical across much of the US at the time.

In the South, Jim Crow laws upheld the privileges of white supremacy by constraining Black consumption.

Racial violence in the form of lynchings, beatings, & much more was common.

DW Griffith’s groundbreaking film, Birth of a Nation (1915), helped re-energize the Ku Klux Klan, which peaked at about five million members in 1925 & spread beyond the South into several northern & western states, such as Indiana & Oregon.

There were many race-based condemnations of jazz in the 1920s, some of which rhetoric appeared in prominent magazines such as Literary Digest & the Ladies Home Journal.

Accusations of primitiveness & sensuality and other slurs by these writers show them as racists in print.

When rock & roll became popular in the 1950s, racial bigotry may have intensified in reaction to the growing civil rights movement. Like minstrel shows & advertising caricatures in the nineteenth century, racially-based criticisms of jazz & rock played upon insulting stereotypes.

The moral panics over jazz & rock & roll shared similar motivations beyond hard racism.

Religious conservatives condemned the music for stirring objectionable behaviors, particularly those of a sexual nature, capturing a sense of moral dissolution after World War I.

Then, in the 1930s, crusaders associated the stigma of cannabis smoking & its purported loosening of sexual restraints with jazz and jazz musicians.

Concerns about youth comprised another motive behind the right-wing assaults on jazz & rock.

With more time in school during the 1920s, an adolescent subculture had begun to take shape. Jazz fueled its rebellious side.

Even more young people stayed in school in the 1950s &, amid the increasing national affluence, they asserted themselves as 'insubordinate' consumers.

Enforcing moral standards regarding sexual expression & corralling the excesses of young people has dominated right-wing thinking since the days of the Puritans.

Supporters of traditional music panned jazz in the 1920s & rock and roll in the 1950s.

Major trade publications, such as Billboard & Variety, waged a war on rock & roll in print.

In 1955, Variety coined the term “leer-ics” as a synonym for what it considered obscene lyrics.

Opposition stemming from economic self-interest melted away when the industry backed R&R.

The rhetorical ruckus from the right motivated the organization of anti-jazz & anti-rock campaigns. In 1919 the National Association of Dancing Masters opened a drive against “vulgar dancing” and “cheap jazz music” and printed booklets charting approved dance steps.

The General Federation of Women’s Clubs crusaded against jazz & at its 1923 convention, voted to “annihilate” the music.

The Ninth Recreational Congress resolved to 'war on jazz' & Henry Ford sponsored a series of traditional folk dances to counteract the evils of jazz steps.

While these groups do not appear to have used the term boycott & did not target record labels, they did lead to restrictions at the municipal level & by 1929 at least sixty communities prohibited jazz in public dance halls.

Rock & roll music underwent a similar strategy of containment. The music industry engaged in self-censorship, with radio stations banning records that offended good morals.

The Catholic Youth Center issued a newsletter to teens urging them to buy only the ‘wholesome’ records.

By 1956 live shows were attracting larger audiences, as well as attention from local authorities who tried to shut them down & even stop kids from dancing in the aisles of theaters. When the fans rebelled against such coercion, the melees were deemed “riots.”

The emergence of predominantly African-American rap music & a hip hop culture in the 1970s & 1980s received furious condemnation from both right- & left-wing critics who objected to the violence, drug references, homophobia, & misogyny expressed by some performers.

Anyway, media boycotts have addressed specific creative productions, brands, and/or companies. They implicitly redirect consumption to alternative offerings & depend upon market forces to succeed in pressuring content creators & sponsors to change their policies.

Right-wing boycott organizers have ranged from large institutions (Roman Catholic Church) to smaller but ongoing groups (American Family Association) to leaderless individuals posting on social media.

As culture changes, right-wing prohibitions have often faced temporal limits.

Religiously & politically right-wing inspired boycotts of media & brands have garnered considerable publicity, but in practice their societal impacts have been modest, although boycotts can be successful in other ways: value expressive or a therapeutic venting of frustrations.

'Anti-consumption' is concerned with criticism of & control over someone else’s consumer behavior: prohibitions & organized attacks on the media frequently mock & stigmatize the consumption of other persons - it's a myth that this is exclusive to the "woke" left.

Boycotts, along with bans on single use plastic bags & straws, incandescent lighting devices, & high flow toilets & shower heads, from the point of view of some conservative & libertarian ideologies, infringe upon consumer rights to free choice in the marketplace.

In America, some on the Right view controls over the sale of certain types of firearms as an attack on their 2nd Amendment rights to consume guns.

But in the final analysis, right AND left-wing inspired anti-consumption projects have more in common than the Right likes to think.

Right-wing boycotts of some media content, brands, & companies, as well as pervasive anti-environmental discourses, have undoubtedly forced changes on marketing systems via self-censorship of content & promotional campaigns.

When products are prohibited, new inventions & sources of supply may become substitutes. Bans on consumer sales of fully automatic weapons, dating back to 1934, eventually led to the invention of bump stocks, used in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting that killed 59 people.

This thread, based on & using extensive quotes from using text from Witkowski's article, has focused on anti-consumption in America, but similar examples of right-wing thought and action can be found globally, both in the past and at present.

Compared to most other rich countries, American & British politics appear skewed to the right, but perhaps no other democracies have been subjected to such an influx of serious money & organizational energy from wealthy conservative interests hostile to environmental regulation.

Spiked & #GBNews are funded directly & in no small part by very wealthy libertarian free-market fundamentalists, with strong ties to free-market think-tanks & political parties, & much of the press & wider news & other media is supportive of deregulated free-market capitalism.

Right-wing boycotts have crossed national borders.

The ominous April 1, 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany organized by the then recently empowered Nazis inspired similar antisemitic outbreaks in several other central European countries.

One of the targets in Germany, FW Woolworth Co. was a subsidiary of the American parent company.

Following suit, in 1938, the pro-fascist Roman Catholic priest & popular radio preacher, Father Charles E. Coughlin promoted the staging of “Buy Christian” rallies around the US.

Throughout the Middle East, fundamentalist inspired boycotts of Danish products, particularly the brands of Arla Foods, started in September 2005 to protest cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad that had appeared in Jyllands-Posten.

Speaking personally, I get that 'free speech' is essential & that attacking & demonizing groups of people over their consumer choices is concerning.

However, the fact is that boycotts remain effective, are not exclusive to the "woke left", & are symptomatic of divided societies.

When a highly partisan TV opinion channel masquerading as a "news" channel - like Fox News & GB News - explicitly state they're proud of their divisive rhetoric, & intend to "wage war on woke", NOBODY should be surprised at the call for an advertising boycott.

#StopFundingHate

What we need is more nuanced, respectful, intelligent & less judgemental debate.

What we definitely do not need any more of is divisive inflammatory rhetoric, designed explicitly to outrage, scapegoat, blame & polarise: the culture war is grotesque - as is populist nationalism.