Say Anything Blog

I’ve seen a lot of crowing from liberal bloggers over Home Depot’s announcement that the won’t be advertising on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show.  The problem?

Home Depot wasn’t advertising on O’Reilly’s show anyway.  The company wasn’t even on the list these left-wing goon squads drew up of his advertisers.  As Don Surber notes:

That’s a lefty victory: Getting someone who has never advertised on a show to vow to stop advertising on that show. It is sort of like bragging that the Pittsburgh Pirates have not lost a football game in 50 years.

So not quite the victory they’d have you believe.  But even if Home Depot had actually been an O’Reilly advertiser, I don’t think it’d be a victory for anyone who values political debate in the media.  I think Roger Simon has the best take on this:

The power of the Internet will only increase as its economic viability - advertising revenue - grows. What Kos and the HuffPo [chief participants in going after O’Reilly’s advertisers] are doing is ultimately discouraging advertising on the Internet and elsewhere where strong opinions are voiced by picking on places they think unfit. The result of this “speech police” behavior will be that all political sites will suffer, as advertisers become gun shy.

At the end of the day, we have to remember that all of these online political forums and blogs (and even political talk shows like O’Reilly’s) are made possible through advertisers.  I could not run Say Anything the way it is without advertisers.  The amount of traffic this site gets makes hosting, bandwidth and maintenance expensive.  Too expensive for me to pay for it out of my own pocket.  Most webmasters of even moderately popular blogs would agree.  Without some form of advertising sponsorship, blogging wouldn’t be worth it.

What we should be focusing on when it comes to political debate is defeating one another with ideas and facts, not trying to silence one another by attacking advertisers.  In the former instance we all win, because vigorous debate is a healthy thing that helps inform us all.  In the latter instance we all lose, because silencing people stifles free debate.