While the publishing world has been trying–and failing–to come up with a strategy to defeat Amazon in its war against Hachette, another media battle has been joined by people who should know better.
Columbia Journalism Review reported earlier this month that PBS–the home of NOVA, Frontline, Mediashift, Newshour, and dozens of others–pulled its ads from Harper’s Magazine after it published a piece critical of PBS.
“After a sales representative at Harper’s Magazine received a phone call on September 18 from a disgruntled advertiser, the subject of a critical story printed the week before, Publisher John R. MacArthur wasn’t surprised that it decided to pull ads from subsequent issues,” David Uberti wrote in CJR. “But he was shocked by who that advertiser was: PBS, the public broadcaster famous for Big Bird and Ken Burns’ epic historical documentaries.”
There’s no debate over whether the Harper’s article (paywall) was critical of PBS. The headline was “PBS Self-Destructs.”
In a statement sent to CJR, a PBS official said that the ads it had bought in Harper’s were pulled because there was a problem with the timing of their appearance. She said she “had no issue with the essay,” but she admitted that “our concern about timing was not communicated clearly to Harper’s.”
-Paul Raeburn
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