More Companies Pull Ads From Wonkette After Trig Palin Post

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Apr 21, 2011   |   12:09PM   |   Washington, DC

More companies have joined Papa Johns, Huggies and Vanguard in dropping ads from the liberal, pro-abortion blog Wonkette after it ran a crass post mocking Sarah Palin and her son Trig, who has Down Syndrome.

The web site ran what was supposedly a satirical piece criticizing Palin for her supposed use of Trig as a “political prop” during the 2008 presidential election, when Palin, the pro-life former Alaska governor, was the Republican vice-presidential candidate. The Wonkette post called Trig “retarded” and “somewhat alive” and claimed Trig was not the child of Todd and Sarah Palin.

The post prompted a conservative backlash on Twitter, with hundreds of people writing to companies that had engaged in advertising on the popular blog site. In addition to the three that quickly dropped their ads, several others have followed suit. Below are the companies and the tweets they sent out announcing their ads will no longer appear on Wonkette. In some cases, it appears the companies contracted with a third-party advertising agency that placed their Internet ads on the blog, along with other websites.

  • JJIll:  “All: Please know we do not condone the Wonkette story. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. We have taken action to remove our ads.”
  • Nordstrom: “Thanks for letting us know. The ads have been removed. We’re sorry to disappoint you.”
  • Reliant Energy: “Thank you for alerting us. We did not choose this site and are working to have this removed immediately.”
  • Bob Evans: “Our ad is not supposed to be running on that site. Agency has been alerted to pull it immediately.”
  • Coldwell Banker:  “We are in the process of pulling our ads from Wonkette.”
  • DealSwarm: “We’ve pulled our ads from the site — we wouldn’t have approved them running next to that blog post. (Trig is a cutie pie.) Thank you for alerting us — we weren’t aware our ads were running alongside a blog post like that. Ads have been pulled.”
  • MetroPCS: “We don’t condone @Wonkette, have removed the ad and ensured that our ads won’t appear on this site in the future. Thanks for bringing to our attention.”
  • StarKist:  “We’ve pulled our ads from Wonkette effective immediately. Any mean-spirited coverage of kids is wrong. Glad you told us about this.”
  • TMobile:  “Thank you for your note. We have pulled all of our advertising from the site. We appreciate the heads up from our fans. It allowed us to respond to the issue in a timely manner.”
  • Starwood Hotels: “Thank you for bringing this to our attention and we are in the process of removing all Starwood ads from this site.”
  • REI: “Thanks for bringing the Wonkette article to our attention today; REI is no longer advertising on the site.”
  • Whataburger: “Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. We immediately looked into this issue and have removed this web site from our ad rotation. This content does not represent Whataburger’s guiding principles or company values. In fact, supporting children with disabilities is one of the areas in which Whataburger focuses its charitable giving efforts. Thank you again for your concern and action. We appreciate your business and hope you will remain a devoted Whataburger customer. “
  • Jimmy Johns: “We are pulling all advertising from Wonkette right away, thanks for the heads up.”
  • Ford: “We have since pulled our ads from Wonkette. Thank you for your concern for the Ford brand. Please share. We already removed our ads from the site (it was a network buy). Please tell others.”
  • Toyota: “To those that contacted us about our ads appearing on Wonkette, we have taken steps to ensure they no longer appear on that site. Thank you.”
  • Adobe: “We’ve taken steps to make sure our ads do not appear on that site in the future.”
  • Choice Hotels: “Thanks for contacting us. We apologize our ad ran on wonkette.com – it was an error. We are working to remove it from the site.”
  • Kodak: “Thanks for sharing your concerns about this. As of today, we are no longer advertising with Wonkette.”
  • Coke: “Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We’ve asked for our ad to stop appearing on the site.”
  • LifeLock: “Thanks everyone for telling us about Wonkette’s offensive article yesterday. We did indeed remove our ads from the site.”
  • AT&T: “Just wanted to let you know we pulled our ads from that site last Wednesday.”
  • Finish Line (shoes): “Thank you for bringing the @Wonkette story to our attention. We will be removing our ads.”
  • Betty Crocker: “Hi everyone! We really appreciate your feedback and we wanted to let you know we have removed all ads from Wonkette.com.”
Wonkette has eventually removed the offensive post and issued an apology.