Wednesday, June 15, 2005

On The Mark -- Rash Decisions

When companies are under attack by a newspaper or television news outlet they sometimes do rash things like pull all of their advertising from that outlet. "That'll show them," they think. In nearly all cases it's a bad move. General Motors recently did this with the LA Times. They had been unhappy with reporting by the Times for some time, and a couple months ago the newspaper's automotive writer wrote a rather unpleasant review of some of GM's new cars. The next day GM pulled all their advertising -- valued at millions of dollars. The end result will be that the Times will continue writing bad reviews if they don't like the cars, and GM will have lost a major connection with its potential customers. Seems like a double-whammy loss for GM to me.

So now members of the GOP want to do the same thing with the International Red Cross. They are contemplating pulling U.S. financial support for IRC because of the IRC reports about abuses at U.S. military detention centers for enemy combatants. Signficant dollars, of course. In their minds it's the classic GOP bullying approach -- if you don't fall in line with how we think we'll hurt you.

Yet, all that will happen is that IRC will find funds somewhere else and keep writing reports that reflect bad things if that's what they see. The buck may stop, but it won't stop the IRC. Thank goodness.

2 comments:

Attila said...

OK, but maybe we should pull our funding from IRC for a different reason: because they're anti-semites. There are plenty more links where that comes from.

B2 said...

Here's a excerpt of what Attila is linking to -- in case you're not going to click. The Israeli version of the Red Cross (Magen David Adom, or "Red Star of David") has been denied admission to the International Red Cross since 1949 because it uses the star of David as its emblem... Since 2000, the American Red Cross has withheld dues to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and its voluntary headquarters contributions to the International Committee of the Red Cross (the IRC). The American Red Cross strongly advocates that the Movement grant full recognition and membership to the Magen David Adom.