ThinkProgress Fighting Back

In response to Bill O'Reilly's dissent-squashing based stalking of Amanda Terkel, ThinkProgress has mounted an email campaign to get Bill's advertisers to withdraw support from a show that participates in such unethically disgusting tactics.

The responses so far have been interesting. For example, AT&T thinks that the email campaign itself is harassment:

Mr. Coe from AT&T called to complain about our automated email campaign, saying it is "harassment." ThinkProgress noted that if he thinks receiving e-mails is harassment, he will surely think that stalking and accosting a person on vacation is outrageous.

Snap!

My favorite, though, has to be the response from Ford:

I agree with you about the rantings of the hopelessly pig-headed Mr. O'Reilly, recognize that I am just an innocent bystander in this email letter silliness. I work at Ford and support Ford, but have no idea how the decisions are made on where we advertise. Frankly, as a mainstream company, we advertise everywhere there are good ratings. That is not an endorsement of the show — that is recognition that people are watching the show. Don't know why they watch that mindless ranting. But they watch in droves. Welcome to America, I guess.

In other words: "O'Reilly is a huge fuckneck with a mindless bunch of idiot zombies for an audience. But they're a huge audience so we need to advertise there."

Update: Just to clarify, the above response is actually from a Ford employee speaking only for himself, and not on behalf of the company. Sorry for presenting it otherwise.