MRC president Brent Bozell passed along this beaut this morning with one word: "SKEWED." Check out the headline in The Hill newspaper: “Major companies decline to fund 2016 GOP convention.” On social media, the headline was “Major companies pull sponsorship of GOP convention.” It began:
Several major companies that sponsored the 2012 Republican National Convention will not be sponsoring the event this year in Cleveland, where Donald Trump is expected to be officially nominated as the party’s presidential nominee.
Wells Fargo, UPS, Motorola, JPMorgan Chase, Ford and Walgreens all told Bloomberg they won’t sponsor this year’s convention, despite helping to fund the last GOP summit in 2012.
But read on, and it becomes plain that this isn’t really news at all. Wells Fargo said it made the decision to sponsor only the Democrats last year, before any presumptive nominees. Ford said it would support neither convention. As for the others?
JPMorgan, Walgreens, UPS and Motorola will not sponsor either party’s convention.
Walgreens told The Hill Friday it would sponsor other events at both parties' conventions.
A source familiar with the convention's fundraising told The Hill on Thursday that the companies had never planned on sponsoring the convention and that the Bloomberg report was based on information from a year ago.
But in today’s media world, the misleading headline goes all over social media, and many readers won’t notice the way the story falls apart.
The Hill (and Bloomberg as well) were hinting it was Trump disgust that was causing this "pullout" -- which would be odd for corporations pulling out of both conventions. Leftist activists have been trying to get corporations to pull out over Trump, but there was no confirmation: "None of the companies commented on whether their decision to pull out was because of the GOP’s divisive presumptive nominee."
