Lefty boycott succeeding in getting advertisers to drop Glenn Beck

No wonder. It’s a full-court press: Media Matters, MSNBC, nutroots blogs, and, as seen below, both of Comedy Central’s wonder twins are all pushing it. (Stewart’s segment doesn’t have to do with the boycott, actually, but it’s amusing enough to merit the embed.) Abandon ship:

Among the advertisers to pull spots from the popular cable talk show are Geico, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway; Procter & Gamble; Sargento Cheese; and Progressive Insurance, according to the companies and Color of Change, one group that is organizing a campaign against the program.

Geico didn’t respond to a request for comment but sent Color of Change an email saying it had “instructed its ad-buying service to redistribute its inventory of rotational spots on [Fox] to their other network programs, exclusive of the Glenn Beck program.”.

Privately held Sargento told its media buyer not to put any of its ads in Beck’s show, said a spokeswoman…

“We place advertising on a variety of programming with the goal of reaching a broad range of insurance consumers who might be interested in our products,” said a spokeswoman for Progressive. “We also seek to avoid advertising on programming that our customers or potential customers may find extremely offensive.”…

For its part, Fox News said through a spokeswoman that while some advertisers have “removed their spots from Beck,” they have just shifted to “other programs on the network, so there has been no revenue lost.”

Erick Erickson’s trying to get a counter-boycott going because “If they are successful, they will move beyond Beck to others.” A noble impulse, but is that really true? My hunch is that companies have limited patience for this sort of thing; they’ll throw a bone to an angry constituency if it’s sufficiently large and focused on one show, but the more targets the boycotters add, the greater the headaches for corporate advertisers who are looking for airtime and sensitive about not alienating other constituencies by getting too political. Even here, the great lefty victory over Beck appears only to have resulted in ads being shifted to other Fox programs. If Media Matters et al. suddenly decide they want O’Reilly and Hannity boycotted too, how many companies will oblige them knowing that it means sacrificing the biggest viewing audience in cable news?

The most depressing thing about this isn’t the fear of lefties taking down conservative broadcasters, it’s the fact that Beck is catching hell while the demagogue di tutti demagogues, a man who eagerly compares Republicans to terrorists when he isn’t busy screaming about right-wing “hate speech,” rests easily in the thought that his own advertising is secure. Exit question: Just what would Olby have to say or do to warrant a rightroots boycott of Countdown’s advertisers? He can’t sink much lower. Someone set the bar, quick!

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