Carbonite drops Rush
Carbonite, a company I never heard of except through its advertising on Rush Limbaugh’s show, has dropped Rush nothwithstanding Rush’s apology.
Here is the statement released earlier tonight:
A Statement from David Friend, CEO of Carbonite as of 6:45pm ET, March 3:
“No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. Mr. Limbaugh, with his highly personal attacks on Miss Fluke, overstepped any reasonable bounds of decency. Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”
Carbonite still is listed as a sponsor of the Ed Schultz Show, demonstrating an amazing hyprocrisy on the part of Carbonite. Indeed, at the same link as the update above, Carbonite’s President defending continuing to advertise on controversial talk shows such as Schultz’s:
We use more than 40 talk show hosts to help get the Carbonite message out to the public. The nature of talk radio is that from time to time listeners are offended by a host and ask that we pull our advertising. This goes for conservatives like Limbaugh and progressives like Stephanie Miller and Ed Shultz. We even get customers who demand that we pull the plug on NPR.
As an advertiser, we do not have control over a show’s editorial content or what they say on air. Carbonite does not endorse the opinions of the shows or their hosts. However, the outcry over Limbaugh is the worst we’ve ever seen. I have scheduled a face-to-face meeting next week with Limbaugh during which I will impress upon him that his comments were offensive to many of our customers and employees alike.
This is the Ed Schultz with whom Carbonite still advertises (Schultz later apologized to Ingraham):
Here is Carbonite’s public contact page. Its public media contact e-mail is media@carbonite.com. It also has a Facebook page and Twitter account. Be polite.
Carbonite made a political statement and needlessly injected itself into the controversy in a very political way. It needs to find out that it works both ways.
Update: There are five other companies which have dropped Rush, according to Think Progress, which is giddy: Quicken Loans, SleepNumber, the Sleep Train, Legal Zoom, and Citrix Systems. Ms. Magazine is mounting a drive against Clear Channel to force Rush off the air.
Here is Carbonite’s stock chart. How low will it go now? Shareholders must be happy at the job their CEO is doing:
Comments
I am just furious with Rush for playing right into the “lefties” hands. I never thought I would hear him do such a thing.
I don’t use Carbonite. if I did, it would be history.
Ms. Fluke is a femin-Nazi activist, who enrolled in this school and made it her mission to take on the healthcare issue of birth control.
I believe all of this smells to high heaven and was a set-up from the start. I seriously doubt that Ms. Fluke was embarrassed by being called a “slut.” She’s had to deal with things like that from the beginning.
These people are going after the Constitution and tearing it down little by little. If we don’t fight back, we only have ourselves to blame.
Breitbart is looking down on us and saying, “C’monm it’s WAR!
If you have ever met a woman willing to reveal that she is one who wants to conceive, and can not, then you have met someone dealing with grief and despair. A woman who yearns to have children, and can’t, will go to a great deal of trouble to have a child in their womb. Preventing a pregnancy is nothing compared to being barren. Infertility is a medical condition and a heavy weight on the heart of those who suffer, the woman and her spouse. Truly the left has turned this all around and backwards. They want to call preventing what is normal, conception, normal.
Blessed Mother Teresa spoke of our having a culture of death, and oral contraceptives being a pill of death. Right she was.
What exactly is courageous about going in front of congress and begging? Shameless definitely, courageous no.
Newt gave a good speech in Ohio:
http://electad.com/videos/newt-gingrich-addresses-ohio-5th-congressional-district-lincoln-reagan-day-dinner-march-3-2012/
Go Newt!
I for one, am not going to schedule a face-to-face meeting with the president of Carbonite – I am however, going to send him an email as to why I am cancelling my account.
With portable hard drives now dirt cheap, and dirt cheap cloud storage available through Amazon among others, why would anyone bother with Carbonite? They aren’t long for this world, with or without Rush.
I just cancelled my Carbonite account that was due to renew at the end of March. Sent an email to Carbonite to inform them why I am taking my business elsewhere. Boy that felt good!
Thank you for the heads-up on MOZY – looking into that service now & will inform my right thinking friends. If MOZY is a smart company, they will secure advertising on Rush’s show on Monday, as I assume there will be quite a few listeners looking for a place to move their business to. I see they have endorsements from Hannity & Mike Gallagher.
A dissenting opinion…
Yesterday I referred to Rush’s apology as “right and necessary”. I stand by it.
I was listening live to the show when the comments were made. When he started into the “Flake” affair on Capital hill, I was ecstatic that it was not going to go unchallenged. When he was closing the segment and said “What does that make her? A slut? A prostitute?” I got the joke, I gave a fist pump.
Had he left it at that, I think everything would have been fine. But, after 3 days of commentary, giving rise to the “What are we going to get out of it?” had me saying enough is enough.
Outside the “slut walkers”, I don’t think it’s “right” to (indirectly or directly) call anyone a slut to a national audience.
It’s just wrong…in my personal code of ethics.
Further, pointing to bad behavior (Ed Shultz) to justify bad behavior is the go to excuse liberals use when losing the argument.
As far as “necessary”. Rush always says “I don’t want to make this about me”…meaning the issue at hand.
I feel the issue has become about Rush, and an apology may be necessary to refocus the issues.
I don’t know. But I do know that Rush has his reasons for the apology. I’m sure he’ll explain why. I suspect when he does, many will agree with them.
We’ll see.
I agree with Browndog. It was humorous and accurate to equivocate the behavior Ms. Fluke was championing with that of a loose woman. But anytime one takes this angle it is imperative to qualify the label, in order to avoid making the attribution personal. Rush failed to do this and thus allowed him to become the story and not the repugnant nature of Fluke’s testimony.
That said I agree with the sentiment that the CEO of Carbonite is a two-faced opportunist. Here is the e-mail I sent to the company:
“Mr. Friend is welcome to choose what personalities advertise Carbonite products. He is hypocritical to drop Rush Limbaugh but keep Ed Shultz. Both have used the same pejorative. Limbaugh to discredit the testimony of Ms. Fluke. Shultz to impugn conservative pundit Laura Ingram. Mr. Friend’s selective judgment concerns me. What other compromises is he willing to make on behalf of Carbonite? I have never owned a Carbonite product and never will. Who would willingly buy a product from a business lead by such a two-faced individual?”
On to the Carbonite issue…
Any CEO/business owner that fires anyone, be it an employee or advertiser, over political correctness will inevitably fail in free market capitalism.
If you are not willing to put and keep the best people in place to make your company successful, your competition will.
-firing a productive worker that does not agree with your politics or personal lifestyle, and replacing him/her with a non-productive worker who does
-firing a productive advertiser that reaches the largest audience for the dollar, replacing it with a non-productive advertiser that reaches a smaller audience.
The only way political correctness pays off in the business world is if production is secondary to your bottom line.
The only way that happens is if the business is somehow tied to the government through subsidies, grants, no bid contracts, tax loopholes, etc.; then, your bottom line is “guaranteed”, and production and cost efficiency take a backseat to the courtship of political favor-
…enter the lobbyists.
And when government “partners with business”, like Obama likes to say..
Well, we have a word for that.
I plan to drop HBO tomorrow as soon as the office opens. Game Of Thrones isn’t THAT good.
She may not be a slut in the biblical sense but she surely is a whore in the intellectual sense.
I can understand apologizing for using the word “slut” however the case that this woman and those she testified are are monumentally dishonest and people of bad faith must be re-iterated every time they open their mouths.
No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady.
Well Mr Friend if one of my girls went in front of Congress and bragged about having so much out of wedlock sex that the contraception and not the 30K plus a year tuition was bankrupting her I for one would be ashamed. And if you cannot deal with Limbaugh but for some reason you can deal with MSMBC or NPR I fine that to say hyprocritical. Having found your comments beyond the pale I cannot deal with you. I’m canceling my four year subscription.
To anyone out there you may want to look at this list of online backup services.
http://www.thetop10bestonlinebackup.com/
Yo Friend, you ain’t the only girl at this dance and you have just aroused your customer base. Pray your parachute is not lead.
Apple computers come with a free program called TimeMachine. all you need is a hard drive, and you can have your backup set up in house in 30 seconds. Carbonite? A Bronx cheer to ‘em!
With Rush, any one thing always has about three things going on. Remember KOOKS? I’m wondering why he apologized. He’s the man who says we shouldn’t. So, why did he? Did his wife come down on him? Did Sarah Palin? Is he running a side story? Is the apology genuine or is he going to come out with some kind of riff on it depending on how the Commies respond? Rush was Breitbart before Breitbart was cool, so what is this shift about?
There’s little I take Rush at face value on cuz he’s always running any number of things on one single story. He was pushing this story fully to get a reaction. His Bill Maher comment was a bit of push back, ever so slight. He got the reaction he wanted, but why did he want it? Was it only ratings, or is he running something else? His diction, ‘slut’ and ‘prostitute’ were intentional cuz that’s how she displayed herself, and the byplay with Snerdley shows it was intentional. He knew a firestorm was coming, and he knew it was going to be huge. He knew he’d take a hit financially from advertisers.
So, why the apology? Is the apology part of his long game in which he pivots and bites the LSM on the ass? Maybe nothing’s going on subterranean. Maybe something is. When you’re dealing with a guy who strategizes to take down the Commies, you gotta think different.
On another note, Ann Coulter wasn’t outraged when her ugly boy toy Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a c**t and a tw*t, was she? That speaks for itself.
[...] An advertiser pulled it’s advertising from Rush Limbaugh’s show… after Rush made (unfortunately very accurate) character descriptions of a gal who gave up her private anonymity to go public in a completely voluntary manner. She had no need to become a public figure, but she volunteered to do so. It was she who gave-up details of her private behavioral choices that fit perfectly the definitions of the words Rush used. It is she… who intends to corrupt the moral integrity of a religiously-based institution. What of Georgetown’s religious freedom? [...]
For those who are going to cancel their Carbonite services look here for alternatives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_services
I dropped carbonite
[...] civilized discourse. Like the civilized discourse that Sgt. Schultz spews on his radio show and on MSNBC? Mr. Friend, as a customer of yours, I can no longer, in good [...]
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