The right-wing news site Breitbart has declared “#WAR” on Kellogg’s, calling for a boycott of the cereal company’s products after they decided to cease advertising on the site.
On Tuesday, the Kellogg Company pulled their adverts from the site, saying that it wasn’t “aligned with our values”. Recent inflammatory stories include “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive And Crazy”; “Data: Young Muslims In The West Are A Ticking Time-Bomb” and “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism Or Cancer?”.
“We regularly work with our media-buying partners to ensure our ads do not appear on sites that aren’t aligned with our values as a company,” Kris Charles, a spokeswoman for Kellogg’s, told Bloomberg. “We recently reviewed the list of sites where our ads can be placed and decided to discontinue advertising on Breitbart.com. We are working to remove our ads from that site.”
Other companies have pulled ads from the site, including Allstate, Nest, EarthLink, Warby Parker, SoFi and the investment group Vanguard. Many did not realise they were advertising on Breitbart because their campaigns are run through automated systems which distribute ads across a large network of sites.
In response to Kellogg’s statement, Breitbart published a furious attack on the cereal company on Wednesday saying that the move represents “an escalation in the war by leftist companies ... against conservative customers”. Editor-in-chief Alexander Marlow called for a boycott of the company’s products, saying: “For Kellogg’s, an American brand, to blacklist Breitbart News in order to placate left-wing totalitarians is a disgraceful act of cowardice.”
Breitbart News, founded in 2007 by conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, rose swiftly to prominence in the last year as it became what its former chairman Stephen Bannon – now senior advisor to the president-elect – called “the platform for the alt-right”, a far-right political movement with links to white supremacist organizations.
“They insult our incredibly diverse staff and spit in the face of our 45,000,000 highly engaged, highly perceptive, highly loyal readers, many of whom are Kellogg’s customers,” said Marlow, whose publication ran a story in 2015 with the headline Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage .
“Boycotting Breitbart News for presenting mainstream American ideas is an act of discrimination and intense prejudice,” he added. “If you serve Kellogg’s products to your family, you are serving up bigotry at your breakfast table.”
The article ends with a list of Kellogg’s products followed by the phrase “Kellogg’s: #WAR” and a link to advertise with the site.
Kellogg’s decision to pull its ads coincided with a campaign by Twitter user Sleeping Giants to pressure firms to drop their ads from Breitbart. Sleeping Giants is now receiving support from a likeminded online campaign to persuade consumers to boycott the Trump brand and any retailers carrying their products, organized around the hashtag #GrabYourWallet.
The targeting of advertisers recalls a similar campaign perpetrated against the now-defunct Gawker Media by the Gamergate movement which Breitbart vocally supported. Breitbart technology editor and “alt-right” darling Milo Yiannopoulos wrote at the time to chastise Gawker for not “apologi zing for the tone of its coverage and the language of its writers”.
Representatives for Kellogg’s and Breitbart News did not respond to requests for comment.
- Joanna Walters contributed reporting.
