The Boycott – Still Viable?
I hope you’re all aware of the crap-u-drama that ABC aired yesterday and Sunday, The Path to 9/11. If you don’t know about it and the ensuing controversy, just plug that phraseinto Google and watch it light up. We accuse others of propaganda, but our propaganda is a Hollywood endeavor! That makes it different.
Air America’s Randi Rhodes has been yelling about this for a while, but rejects boycotting as a possible reaction. She says it would ‘never work’ to tell people to refrain from watching the biggest ABC premieres of the season: Desperate Housewives and Lost. I think a boycott would work if we convinced people not to watch on TV, but to download them, instead. Is suggesting such a thing illegal? I have no clue. For the clueless, we’d have to set up secret websites with “How to” guides and such, wouldn’t we?
Randi rejects boycotting in general, as far as I can tell. I guess she feels people would never get it together en masse and step up like that.
I’m wondering if that’s true? Do boycotts not work anymore?
There are two ways a boycott might “not work” — you might not get enough people to participate, or you might get people to participate but it doesn’t have any effect. I think boycotts do work in the second sense (or at least corporations think they do, which amounts to the same thing), since conservative groups are always using threatened boycotts to get companies to stop being so pro-gay. So the trick is to make the boycott work in the first sense, by convincing enough people to boycott, and making ABC aware of the boycott (otherwise it’s just an inexplicable drop in ratings).