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Carbonite Says Pulling Ads From Limbaugh's Show Hurt Company

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Tuesday, 07 August 2012 08:20

Written by Cliff Levine

Back in February, the Democratic Party, with direction from the White House, coordinated a plan to create a phony issue: free contraceptives for women is a basic human right.  Driving this narrative was the unattractive Sandra Fluke, an Ivy League crackpot that said she couldn't afford birth control and that it's a right for it to be free.  This led conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh to accurately describe her as a slut, leading advertisers to leave his show.  One of those advertisers has reported the move hurt their company.

Last week, Carbonite, the online hard drive backup company that bowed to liberal pressure to drop Rush Limbaugh's show as an advertising platform, released their Q2 2012 financial results.  And Wall Street wasn't pleased.  From Legal Insurrection:

On August 1 Carbonite released its 2d Quarter 2012 results, the first full quarter after dropping Limbaugh in March.  The results shocked Wall Street, as Carbonite did not meet its growth targets, causing multiple analysts to drop the target price.  The stock dropped 15% in a day.

This is the message that CEO David Friend shared with the media at the height of the non-controversy coordinated by the Left: 

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 We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse. 

During the conference call with Wall Street analysts, Carbonite's CEO noted that dropping Rush as an advertising platform played a significant role in the company's losses:

Yeah, I’d say it turned out to be a bigger issue than we had anticipated. Because you know at the time there was a lot of noise, I mean we had a huge spike in web traffic around that time just because of all the interest in the whole subject. And it took close to a month for that to sort of die down. And meanwhile our metrics were, we really couldn’t see what was going because there was so much noise around the website that we had no idea what the ultimate impact was going to be.  It turned out to be a bigger hole in our revenue than we had thought when we initially did this.

What can we take away from this incident?  Keep politics out of business and don't bow to liberal freak shows that want to dictate free speech and an individual's opinion.  And this all came from a Democrat operative, Sanda Fluke, who wants mandatory health insurance coverage for sex change operations, begging the question if she's a man or woman?  Rush did lose a number of advertisers, but he's gained many listeners since the incident.  

The Left, throught their typical Marxist organizations - Think Progress, Media Matters and other adult bed wetters - pushed hard with their Drop Rush campaign and threatened advertisers they'd be boycotted if they didn't drop the program.  It's these bully tactics that destroy America and make liberals feel that their efforts are valid.  They're not and are incredibly anti-American.  What happened to Carbonite is welcome news.

Cliff Levine is a contributing editor for Habledash.