A new development we seem to have missed at SpinWatch - but noticed by Doug Ireland in his blog Direland, politics and media-analyses and commentary from veteran political journalist Doug Ireland last June:

Spurred on by a biblical injunction evangelicals call “The Great  Commission,” and emboldened by George W. Bush’s re-election, which is perceived as a “mandate from God,” the Christian right has launched a series of boycotts and pressure campaigns aimed at corporate America — and at its sponsorship of entertainment, programs and activities the Christers don’t like.

And it’s working. Just three weeks ago, the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association (AFA) announced it was ending its  boycott of corporate giant Procter & Gamble — maker of household staples like Tide and Crest — for being pro-gay. Why? Because the AFA’s boycott (which the organization says enlisted 400,000 families) had succeeded in getting P&G to pull its millions of dollars in advertising from TV shows like Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. P&G also ended its advertising in gay  magazines and on gay Web sites. And a P&G executive who had been given a leave of absence to work on a successful Cincinnati, Ohio, referendum that repealed a ban on any measures protecting gays from discrimination was shown the door.

“We cannot say they are 100 percent clean, and we ask our supporters to let us know if they discover P&G again being involved in pushing the homosexual lifestyle,” growls the AFA’s statement of victory over the corporate behemoth, “but judging by all that we found in our research, it appears that our concerns have been addressed.” The Wall Street Journal reported on May 11 that “P&G officials won’t talk publicly about the boycott. But privately, they acknowledge the [Christer] groups turned out to be larger, better funded, better organized, and more sophisticated than the company had imagined.”

But the P&G cave-in to the Christers is only the tip of the iceberg. In just the past year and a half, AFA protests and boycotts — or even the simple threat of boycotts — have been enough to make a host of American companies pull their ads from TV shows the Christers consider pro-gay or salacious. Desperate Housewives has lost ads  from Safeway, Tyson Foods, Liberty Mutual, Kohl’s, Alberto Culver, Leapfrog and Lowe’s after the AFA’s One Million Dads campaign targeted the show’s  sponsors. Life as We Know It got the same AFA treatment — and lost ads from McCormick, Lenscrafters, Radio Shack, Papa John’s International, Chattem and Sharpie

 I've posted the entire article in the SpinWatch news section, as well as a second item from June this year: DEEP THROAT'S CRIMES: Mark Felt, Constitution-shredder on the former CIA hotshot's role in COINTELPRO:

After Mark Felt outed himself as the legendary “Deep Throat” in the Watergate case last week, there was a media rush to canonize the FBI’s former Number Two man, and politicians proposed he be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But in all this gush to make Felt a hero, there has been little or no mention of Felt’s prime role in COINTELPRO -- the most gigantic domestic political spying and disruption operation ever in American history, illegally conducted by the FBI.

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