PC censorship growing on the Internet: Stop Funding Hate is a nasty, elitist campaign for press censorship, by Brendan O’Neill.
Intolerance wears a progressive mask in the 21st century. … And now assorted leftists and tweeters are seeking to punish tabloid newspapers, to starve them of big revenue, in the name of promoting tolerance. Yes, intolerance — in this case of the redtop press and its right to say what it wants — is tolerance.
Joanne and I often joke that PC types are only motivated by money and moral vanity — the activists by the former, the unpaid troops by the latter. But now they want to keep all the advertising revenue from big companies in the PC media? Commercial greed knows no bounds.
Stop Funding Hate is a new campaign aimed at getting big businesses — like Lego, John Lewis, Walkers Crisps, Virgin — to stop advertising in what are referred to as ‘hate newspapers’: that is, tabloids, primarily the Daily Mail….
They want huge corporations — Virgin is a $19bn business, Lego a $5bn one — to put pressure on newspapers; to tell them we will stop giving you money unless you change your editorial tone. Let’s curb the euphemisms and all the talk of promoting tolerance — this is a sly, sinister effort to chill and tame the press; a marshalling of capitalist power to punish newspapers and force them to change. It’s a stab at censorship, not a cry for tolerance. …
I’m sorry, but when you plead with Virgin and Lego and huge stores to deprive the rabble-rousing press of funds because they are pro-Brexit, anti-judge and not in favour of mass migration, then you are engaged in naked political censorship. You are agitating for the rich to try to stop mass newspapers from saying what they think.
The campaigners are actually open about this. One of the chief organisers of SFH says it’s about changing ‘the financial balance’ so that we ‘get to the point where… you don’t make money by publishing these headlines’. And so you stop publishing them. …
SFH’s footsoldiers fancy themselves as liberal, hilariously, but actually they’re following in the steps of others in history who likewise sought to tame papers through de-funding them or depriving them of advertising. … In Africa in the 1990s, authoritarian regimes used ‘advertising as an instrument of censorship’, as one account puts it, where officialdom would threaten to ‘withdraw its advertising’ from troublesome newspapers, leading to a situation where ‘many newspapers [decided] to censor themselves to avoid closure’.
Western progressives are proudly following in the footsteps as nasty African dictators.
