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Boycotts

A boycott is an organized refusal to purchase from, trade with, or work for an organization in an effort to influence or reform it or otherwise draw attention to an issue that it represents. Boycotts are publicized and sometimes organized by news organizations, as well as targeted at them. After considering the history of boycotts, this entry describes different kinds of boycotts aimed at or originating from news organizations, notes how boycotts have proliferated due to the affordances of digital and social media, and concludes with an examination of the politics of boycotts, in terms of their effectiveness and their structural role in the media system.

Histories of the Boycott

The term boycott was coined in 1880 in the wake of a community-wide withdrawal of labor and trade from English land agent Captain Charles C. Boycott. Organized by the Irish Land League, the withdrawal was a response to Boycott refusing to negotiate reduced rents for struggling Irish farmers and moving to evict them. The idea of using boycott as a term to describe this form of protest was arrived at by a local priest and an American journalist reporting on the Irish land troubles. As it became publicized in the press, the term boycott quickly entered common parlance, was translated into other languages, and appeared in Webster’s Dictionary by 1882.

Its rapid adoption likely occurred because while the term was new, the practice was not. The origin story of boycotts as a practice is frequently located in pre-Revolutionary America, when nonimportation and nonconsumption of British goods was a key way that colonists expressed their displeasure at British rule, as well as built common cause and a unified political identity across different social groups. This movement highlighted the political potential of consumer power, dramatically illustrated by the Boston Tea Party of 1773, during which protestors tossed imported tea—that most British and imperial of drinks—into Boston Harbor to protest British tax policy in the American colonies. The notion that boycotts are particularly American in nature has persisted, particularly given the prominence of boycotting in the mid-20th century Civil Rights movement, when African American activists organized a mass withdrawal of patronage from the Montgomery Bus system in Alabama, as well as in Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns against discriminatory employers, to name just two examples.

However, boycotting as a social practice has a longer and broader history. Boycotting foreign goods has been a feature of several resistance movements to colonization, just one example being the Indian practice of swadeshi, a movement originating in the 19th century where people boycotted foreign-produced goods, particularly clothing, in favor of domestic products.

Boycotts and American Journalism

The American media, including news organizations, are mostly for-profit enterprises that depend on some combination of consumer purchase, subscription, and advertiser support. When Americans are unhappy with what they see in media, boycotts are one of the tools they use to express their displeasure and attempt to change it.

The most direct kind of media boycott occurs when audiences stop purchasing a particular media product. This occurred in the early days of the American press in 1731, when clergy encouraged people not to purchase Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette or patronize his printing business in protest of an advertisement he had printed, for a ship offering berth for passengers to Barbados, that stated clergymen would not be admitted. Franklin’s “Apology for Printers,” a letter he published on the front page of the Gazette, made it clear that such threats to withdraw support from his newspaper arose on a regular basis. He went on to offer a full-throated defense of his right as a printer to publish what he saw fit, given both his need to make a living and his bedrock belief that truth would vanquish falsehood when subjected to public debate, and that such judgments ought to be made by the public and not the printer.

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