Kellogg’s pulls ads from pro-Trump site, faces boycott
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Kellogg’s is facing a boycott organized by the Trump-aligned Breitbart News after the cereal giant decided to pull its advertising from the website.
In the latest clash over corporate marketing and politics, Breitbart called on its readers to stop buying Kellogg’s products to protest the company’s “act of discrimination and intense prejudice.”
Breitbart, a far-right news website known for its no-holds-barred opinions and accused by critics of fanning racial prejudice, was closely aligned with Donald Trump during his campaign, and its Chairman Steve Bannon is moving from the campaign to a key White House role as Trump’s chief strategist.
Kris Charles, a Kellogg Company spokeswoman, said the decision to stop advertising on Breitbart “had nothing to do with politics.”
“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 set forth in our advertising guidelines,” she said in a statement.
“This involves reviewing websites where ads could potentially be placed using filtering technology to assess the words and phrases that make up a site’s content.... we learned from consumers that ads were placed on Breitbart.com and decided to discontinue advertising there.”
Breitbart responded with an online #DumpKelloggs petition, while arguing that its website “is the largest platform for pro-family content anywhere on the internet.”
“For Kellogg’s, an iconic American brand, to blacklist Breitbart News in order to placate left-wing totalitarians is a disgraceful act of cowardice,” the online petition says. The news comes after some Trump supporters called for a boycott of PepsiCo prod- ucts based on rumored, but unverified, comments from its top executive, and on other brands whose executives had criticized the Republican billionaire.
Breitbart News, created by the late conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, makes its impact with bare-knuckled headlines that mix opinion and sometimes stretched facts.
Some examples of Breitbart stories are “Gay rights have made us dumber, it’s time to get back in the closet,” “There’s no hiring bias against women in tech, they just suck at interviews,” and “Science proves it: Fat-shaming works.”