David Crisp
In January I wrote about Downtown Businesses Against Advertising in the Billings Gazette, a Facebook group organized to protest a Gazette column by Editor Darrell Ehrlick that they perceived as a slam on downtown.
“This group is started as a protest to the Gazette and its editorial board,” the page said, “and we encourage all members to transfer their ad dollars to businesses that support downtown, not tear it down.”
I argued in the column that advertising boycotts were the wrong way to go about righting the wrong that some downtown businesses perceived.
The group was started by Sean Lynch, a downtown businessman whose current venture is the Pub Station in the old Greyhound bus station. So I was surprised last week to see a full-page ad in the Gazette’s Enjoy section from the Pub Station.
I asked Sean in an email what was up. Gracious as always, he responded promptly. He said he thought the protest had shed some needed light, enough that the Gazette assembled a meeting of local business owners to hear their grievances. But he said he didn’t think it really changed much.
“With the protest, all I ended up doing was damaging the wage and standard of living of my sales rep (and most of downtown’s), Michelle Maki,” he wrote. “By asking businesses to drop their advertising along with mine, I was actually only affecting the person I have the utmost respect for at that paper. It was not sitting well with me.”
Guess I could say I told you so, but these boycotts are a tricky thing. I have never publicly called for a boycott of any business, but I have a few longstanding private boycotts that I probably will honor to the grave: Charmin toilet tissue, because of the old Mr. Whipple ads; Snapple, because of Rush Limbaugh; Wal-Mart, because it’s Wal-Mart.
I’ve lately been weighing another personal boycott. One local business recently decided it no longer wanted an Outpost rack in its store, which is fine. We know that we are in businesses by their good grace, and I never hold it against a business that decides for whatever reason to turn us out or not to let us in.
This has happened before, but only by businesses where I never really spent money anyway. Boycotting this business would have a fairly big impact both on it and on me. So I’m weighing it. Mostly, I just want the rack back.
It is puzzling, though, why some businesses so cavalierly treat fellow business people rudely. How does that even make sense?
For newspapers, causing occasional offense is part of the job, and we pay the price for it. I get that.
But why deliberately offend people when it doesn’t come with the territory? Don’t they think our ad reps and delivery people and, yes, our editors shop? It’s a mystery.
The ideology of ignorance
Sometimes it seems that ignorance has in itself become a sort of ideology. In support of his bill in the Montana Legislature to cut each income tax bracket by 10 percent, Rep. Nicholas Schwaderer, R-Superior, said, as reported on public radio, “Taxation of income is theft.”
Government depends on taxation for its very existence. So if taxation is theft, government is a fundamentally criminal enterprise.
Why would Schwaderer get involved in what amounts to an organized crime syndicate? It isn’t like he was asking to get rid of taxes altogether. Perhaps he is just positioning himself for the next election: “Vote Nicholas Schwaderer for better state government—now with 10 percent less theft.”
Then there’s the legislative debate about Medicaid expansion, one of the uglier sides of this year’s session.
Americans for Prosperity, which has been targeting legislators who favor expanding Medicaid, put out a news release last week arguing that some states were in danger of bankruptcy because of the cost of Medicaid expansion. I replied by asking which states. No response.
Then the AFP had a column in the Gazette that backed off from the bankruptcy claim but said that Arkansas, Illinois and Ohio were having budget troubles because they accepted federal dollars to expand Medicaid. I Googled those state names for an hour or so in every way I could think of, but came up with no evidence.
I know that I haven’t worked hard enough at this yet to just dismiss their claims. But it’s discouraging because deep in my heart I know that deep in their hearts they don’t really care about the evidence. They just hate Obamacare.
They probably would rather not know.
David Crisp has worked for newspapers since 1979. He has been editor and publisher of the Billings Outpost since 1997.
