Stop Rush Limbaugh

Some of the same activists that persuaded
advertisers to boycott Glenn Beck’s television show on Fox News in 2009
are now mobilizing against Rush Limbaugh in the wake of his verbal attacks on a Georgetown University law school student this week.
Actually, they are remobilizing. A Twitter account, “Stop Rush,”
which has been dormant since late 2010, woke up on Wednesday, when Mr.
Limbaugh first called the student, Sandra Fluke, a “slut.”
On Friday, as complaints from “Stop Rush” and others about Mr.
Limbaugh’s comments mounted, a handful of companies said that they had
halted their advertising on “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” at least
temporarily.
One of the companies, Quicken Loans, wrote on Twitter, “Due to
continued inflammatory comments — along with valuable feedback from
clients and team members — QL has suspended ads on Rush Limbaugh
program.”
Two mattress companies, Sleep Train and Sleep Number, made similar
statements on Friday. A representative of Sleep Number wrote on Twitter,
“Recent comments by Rush Limbaugh do not align w/ our values, so we
made decision to immediately suspend all advertising on that program.”

Mr. Limbaugh’s comments on Wednesday about Ms. Fluke, who had testified
in support of the Obama administration’s requirement that health
insurance plans cover contraceptives for women, were immediately noticed
by Media Matters, a liberal media monitoring group that has been raising red flags about Mr. Limbaugh’s language for years.
“What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke,” Mr. Limbaugh
said that day, misstating her name, “who goes before a Congressional
committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What
does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a
prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.”
Mr. Limbaugh followed up again on Thursday and Friday, even as Ms.
Fluke defended herself in interviews and President Obama called her to
indicate his support for her.
The “Stop Rush” Twitter account asked on Thursday, “Are y’all ready
to @StopRush? Getting the strong sense that it’s time and the feedback
has been there so far. Spread the word.”
The person behind the account, Angelo Carusone, has subsequently
started to contact some of the sponsors of “The Rush Limbaugh Show,”
which is distributed by local radio stations across the country.
Mr. Carusone similarly ran a Twitter account called “Stop Beck” in
2009 that targeted Glenn Beck for calling Mr. Obama a racist. He and
other activists and groups contacted advertisers, hundreds of whom
eventually asked Fox to keep their ads off Mr. Beck’s show.
Mr. Carusone started up the “Stop Rush” account in January 2010,
shortly after a devastating earthquake in Haiti, when Mr. Limbaugh asserted
that Obama administration would use American aid to Haiti to “burnish
their, shall we say, ‘credibility’ with the black community.”
That same month, Mr. Limbaugh was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League, a powerful pro-Israel group, for what they called a “borderline anti-Semitic remark” about Jews.
Mr. Carusone said at the time that he tried to register a domain name
for his effort, StopRush.com, but he found out that it was already
registered by the company that syndicates “The Rush Limbaugh Show.”
Mr. Limbaugh has been a target of activists for many years. A “Boycott Rush” page on ToppleBush.com has been listing purported sponsors of “The Rush Limbaugh Show” since at least 2003, at the start of the Iraq war.
Back then, the operators of the Web sites were outraged by Mr.
Limbaugh’s criticisms of antiwar protesters as “anti-American,
anti-capitalist, pro-Marxists and communists.”
The Web site was updated again on Friday. It lists several
advertisers that have been targeted by Mr. Limbaugh’s critics, including
ProFlowers, which was inundated by Twitter messages on Thursday and
Friday.
“We do not endorse the views expressed by Rush,” the company’s
Twitter account said in response to complaints. But it stopped short of
saying it had pulled its ads from his program, which is the most popular
syndicated radio talk show in the United States.
Meanwhile, Daily Kos, a popular Web site among liberal activists, published a petition against Mr. Limbaugh and said it would send the signatures to advertisers.