Yahoo! Finance on #DumpKelloggs: ‘Cereal Needs to Be Agnostic’

Yahoo! Finance weighed in on the “#DumpKelloggs” campaign on Wednesday, concluding that Kellogg’s had made a mistake by picking a fight with Breitbart News. “Cereal needs to be agnostic,” said Alexis Christoforous, the host of The Final Round.

Yahoo! Finance senior writer Rick Newman agreed.

“First of all, I think Kellogg would much prefer to pull its ads from Breitbart without anybody knowing about it,” he said.

“Breitbart has a devoted and not small audience, and it’s not hard to imagine Breitbart supporters saying, ‘Well, we’re going to boycott Kellogg.’ Even if that doesn’t hurt their business that much, that’s the last thing any company wants, is to get in the middle of political stuff going on in the country right now. You have to think: there must have been a quieter way they could have done this.”

Newman later added: “This is just not what companies want to do … Does Kellogg’s basically want to say, ‘We don’t want anybody who belongs to the conservative side of the spectrum to eat our cereal’? I don’t think so. They probably wish they had done this differently.”

Kellogg’s announced earlier this week that it is attempting to pull ads from running on Breitbart News’ website because of an ostensible conflict with the company’s “values.”

Since then, Kellogg’s has suffered a backlash and a barrage of bad publicity, some of it coincidental. On Wednesday, Amnesty International released a report alleging that Kellogg’s profited from child labor and forced labor in harvesting palm oil for Pringles chips sold in China.

Other Kellogg’s practices are now coming under closer scrutiny, including the company’s involvement in controversial racial disputes and left-wing politics in general.

Over 125,000 people have signed an anti-Kellogg’s petition hosted at Breitbart.com in less than 24 hours.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.