Several readers have alerted me that there's a Google Ad showing up on the site from Mr. Disgusting Motherfucker himself, the king of the liars, Papa Bear Bill O'Reilly.
I don't know how it got there, or why anyone with half a brain thinks that advertising Loofaman's bullshit would be a success with the vast majority of people who read my blog, but this is as good a time as any to articulate my feelings on advertising, which pretty much mirror Josh Marshall's:
While we reserve the right to reject ads on the basis of taste and appropriateness, we neither accept nor reject ads on the basis ofJosh bases his policy on preserving the integrity of TPM being a news and information site. While my site clearly isn't that, and the editorial integrity issue isn't nearly the same, the implied endorsement issue is, at least to me.
political content. Clearly, if you wished to do so, you could find 'taste' or
'appropriateness' reasons to reject a lot of stuff you just don't agree
with politically or find politically offensive. But as best as we are
able we try never to do that.
If we reject ads that we disagree with, every ad we accept becomes, to one degree or another, a de facto endorsement. And that's a de facto endorsement that is tied to money we're paid to run the advertising.
For the record, I think Bill O'Reilly is the biggest douchebag in the universe this side of Dick Cheney and King George, but if his people want to waste their time and money advertising to a group of people who are too smart to buy into his bullshit, I'm happy to take it, and give it to the ACLU, or Media Matters, or some other organization that you could call a Bill O'Reilly offset.
FPM hasn't sold any actual ads for WWdN, yet. It's been about three months since I joined their network, though, so I understand that they'll soon start finding advertisers who want to speak directly to you who read this site. Once that begins, the backup ads from Google (including offending Bill O'Reilly ads) should go away.
