Double standards by The New York Times on product boycotts: The silly anti-Trump boycott of Goya Foods was covered with humorless seriousness, while a 2017 Sean Hannity-inspired boycott of Keurig coffeemakers was mocked as possibly showing “support for child molesters.”
The paper sympathized with liberals pitching childish social media fits over the audacity of the Latino president of Goya Foods praising President Trump for expanding opportunities for Hispanics. But the tone was utterly different when Hannity kicked off a boycott against Keurig after the company pulled ads from his show in 2017.
Amelia Nierenberg’s story appeared Monday: “With Praise of Trump, Goya’s President Angers Core Latino Community.” There was nothing but empathy for Goya protestors:
After Mr. Unanue’s comments, consumers have been dumping out ingredients and calling for a boycott on social media with the hashtags #BoycottGoya, #GoyaFoods and #Goyaway. Prominent Latino politicians like Julián Castro, the former presidential candidate and secretary of housing and urban development, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighed in as well.
The Times even had the gall to criticize the quality of the product itself, an odd angle in a story about a boycott that felt more like a politically correct pile-on than valuable news.
Nierenberg let chef Eric Rivera (a Goya competitor) get in the final insult:
“They just colonized our culture to benefit themselves,” Mr. Rivera said, referencing the Unanue family heritage. “They literally just like, Christopher Columbus-ed us.”
Also from the “no good deed goes unpunished” file, Derrick Bryson Taylor’s “Goya Foods Boycott Takes Off After Its President Praises Trump”:
Mr. Unanue’s comments drew swift condemnation on social media from people who were upset that a company whose products are popular among Latinos and others would so openly support a president who has vilified immigrants, especially those from Latin America, and whose harsh policies have targeted them....
Childish behavior from prominent liberals was passed along in straightforward fashion, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet: “Oh look, it’s the sound of me Googling ‘how to make your own Adobo.’”
Even a Times food writer, Marion Nestle, got into the act:
“Unanue’s support of a president who loses no opportunity to diminish the humanity of Goya Foods’ core Latino customers is at best tone deaf, and at worst an explicit endorsement of the president’s discriminatory attitudes and policies,” [Nestle] said in a statement.
Taylor at least quoted Unanue noting he’d worked with Michelle Obama without complaints.
The Times treated the conservative protest against Keurig quite differently. In November 2017, reporter Jonah Engel Bromwich wrote up the brewing controversy: “Hannity Fans Destroy Keurig Coffee Makers After the Company Pulls Its Ads.” The same way liberals threw away Goya products someone else could have used during this economic crisis (click “expand”):
“Liberals are offended by this video of a Keurig being thrown off of a building. Please retweet to offend a liberal.”
That tweet, which was posted with a video of a Keurig Green Mountain coffee maker being dropped from the second story of an apartment building, was one of many sent over the weekend with the hashtag #boycottkeurig.
(....)
Why call for a boycott of Keurig? And why would liberals be offended by the sight of an environmentally problematic, pod-based coffee maker meeting an untimely doom?
The story begins, as you might have expected, with Sean Hannity.
It involved comments Hannity made on his radio show about controversial Alabama Republican U.S Senate candidate Roy Moore.
While some on the left dutifully took up arms, tweeting in support of Keurig, others just seemed bemused (or amused).
“Sorry, I was off Twitter for a while,” wrote the author Geraldine DeRuiter. “It appears that people are destroying coffee machines to show their support of child molesters?”
