Opinion: Boycott can hit bad actors in the pocketbook

When Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos decided not to allow his newspaper to endorse Kamala Harris for president, a quarter million readers canceled their subscriptions.

Now this esteemed newspaper is suffering from a credibility crisis that may never recover under Bezos’ compromised ownership.

Something similar happened to Fox News back in 2020, when the network essentially called the election for Joe Biden while their most loyal viewers were drinking in Donald Trump’s Kool-Aid and denying the reality of his loss.

A sudden drop in Fox viewership caused the network and its billionaire owners to cave in to the pressure and spin their way back into the good graces of the MAGA crowd.

These two consumer reactions demonstrate the power of a marketplace in which goods and services are driven by the buyers, not the sellers. The pushback against these two media giants wasn’t planned, they were spontaneous combustions. Imagine the power that could have been welded if they had been organized boycotts.

We live in a capitalistic culture in which the consumer has little say beyond their own pocketbook, so why not use that power to our advantage? An organized effort to, say, rein in Elon Musk by boycotting Tesla could have an impact on the marketplace and, by extension, politics and government.

Of course, the boycott would have to reach critical mass, with enough people participating to impact Tesla’s bottom line, but if that were to happen, you’d see a shift from Tesla as the leader in EV cars to other automobile manufacturers stepping up their EV production lines to fill the gap.

Of course, Tesla isn’t your typical product, it’s cutting-edge technology that’s too expensive for the average working American. Fox News, on the other hand, must have mass appeal to stay vibrant. The problem there is that only the progressive crowd would be willing to boycott that news network — and they’re not watching Fox News already, so such as boycott would be ineffective in getting Rupert Murdoch’s attention.

But what if progressives boycotted 21st Century Fox and all its television and movie interests? Or just the football games broadcast on Fox Sports? It would take some discipline, sacrifice and messaging on the part of the progressive consumers out there, but if a drop in viewers was significant enough, Murdoch might just start to rethink his politics. He’s done it before.

You may be thinking about the “cancel culture” that gripped the U.S. in recent years, and it has indeed served at times as a mechanism for boycotts. But I’m thinking about the good old-fashion boycott, of which history is rife. They’ve been used for good, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott that ignited the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, or for bad, such as the Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned businesses back in the 1930s, which led to the Holocaust. 

The power of the boycott has often been used to stir up revolutions such as our own — the Boston Tea Party was the byproduct of a colonial boycott of British goods, which ultimately led to a war for American independence.

I realize boycotts can be a two-edge sword, but considering the fact that the billionaire class won the last election at the ballot box, voting with our pocketbooks seems altogether warranted. We’ve got to hit ’em where it hurts, and money is what they understand.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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