The Editorial
Here we go again.
The current publicity surrounding Campaign Life’s Homemaker’s boycott shows that this kind of strategy is effective.
While the magazine itself denies the boycott is having an effect on their advertising revenue, we have to wonder why, in that case, are the media suddenly so interested?
Name-calling has started again – the usual uninspired litany: “anti-choice,” “right-wing nuts” (never mind the mixing of metaphors), “religious fanatics trying to impose…” etc. It is disheartening to have an opposition with no spark of wit or imagination, but yet it is encouraging to note that the sluggish beast is somewhat aroused.
Campaign Life supporters have rendered valuable service to the advertisers in Homemaker’s. Now they know something tangible about how their public feels about the company they have been keeping, and about how the public responds to their subsidizing of propaganda.
When leaflets giving just one side of a story are dropped from airplanes, they are called propaganda. When an equally biased message is gift-wrapped in glossy ads and kitchen hints are popped through your mail slot, well, the difference is small.
Again, we are hearing the blandishments about “freedom of expression,” and about “choice.” Somehow, the sluggish beast avers, pro-lifers are out to destroy these two liberties.
In fact, no pro-lifer wants to take these liberties, or to take them lightly. Each entails a careful underpinning of responsibilities, or it becomes a cloak for mere anarchy – a point which the beast blandly and monotonously ignores.
Evidently, Homemaker’s has “felt the pinch” and has applied to its colleagues for support and reassurance. The ad-men, for their part, are back-pedaling like mad: they are intensely sensitive to public opinion.
They so NOT want the public riles, or even watching. If a few people write in, they can be dismissed; when a lot of missives arrive, they worry. They send out bland, reassuring, jargon-filled responses to the letters, and they wait and worry some more.
Of course, Homemaker’s can conduct its editorial policy as it wishes, as do all newspapers and magazines in this country, including The Interim.
Obviously, on the other hand, Homemaker’s is a special case because it is imposed (a gift) propaganda. If you don’t want to support it, you can’t not buy it. Your only recourse is that of not contributing to those who do pay for it – a pointless inconvenience unless they are told that is what you area doing.
