I love when companies stand up for free speech and refuse the speech-supressing bully tactics of entities whose entire purpose is to eliminate the diversity of thought from the airwaves.
Media Matters is gearing up to target a half-dozen of the Fox News Channel’s advertisers — Netflix possibly being one of them — though Orbitz Worldwide on Thursday stuck up for the nation’s top cable news outlet.
Orbitz, which is the first target of a campaign launched at DropFox.com — a new website from the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters — on Thursday also accused Media Matters of a “smear campaign.”
DropFox’s goal is to pressure advertisers into either pulling their ads from Fox News or forcing Fox to alter its usually conservative messages. DropFox focused on Orbitz first because among its assets is a travel website dedicated to gays and lesbians, a community Fox News is antagonistic toward, according to DropFox.
[…]
In Orbitz, though, DropFox may have already bitten off more than it can chew. The company is not only refusing to buckle under the pressure — which includes an online petition signed by 40,000 people asking it to ditch Fox News — but it is striking back at Media Matters, warning the organization it is risking its credibility by attacking Orbitz.
“This is a political organization that has been funded pretty extensively to go after one network, and we aren’t going to engage in that fight,” Orbitz spokesman Brian Hoyt said.
“We have a strict policy of tolerance and non-discrimination, and that means we don’t favor one political side over another. Tolerance is a two-way street,” he said. “We’re going to advertise on conservative TV stations, liberal TV stations and — if there are any out there — unbiased news broadcasts.”
[…]
The evidence DropFox and Media Matters have provided Orbitz was not convincing.
“We haven’t bowed to any boycott in the past, and we won’t bow to these types of smear campaigns in the future,” Hoyt said.
Remember this company when you’ve travel needs that arise and support them for supporting free speech.