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Twi-porting on the Alleged AriZona Iced Tea Boycott—Proceed Carefully, Old Media!

Posted April 29, 2010 by Ted Hesson
Categories: Media Watch

Yesterday, a multitude of irony-hungry websites, blogs, and newspapers reported that some participants in the emerging boycott against goods, services, and tourism in Arizona had decided to switch their iced tea allegiance from AriZona to other varieties of the summery beverage.

However, AriZona is actually headquartered right here in Woodbury, Nassau County.

Although this story made the rounds on the Inter-Webs yesterday, the overall reporting was alarmingly weak, and it appears that the iced tea boycott was more of a joke than an actual movement.

One blog post from the New York Daily News cites two quotes about the boycott copied from Twitter (and by the way, old-school media, it’s “tweeted” not “twittered,” whether you like it or not).

“Dear Arizona: If you don’t change your immigration policy, I will have to stop drinking your enjoyable brand of iced tea,” Twittered Jody Beth in Los Angeles.

“It is the drink of fascists,” wrote Travis Nichols in Chicago.

Newsday reported that “there were many Internet posts incorrectly listing AriZona Iced Tea as an Arizona business to boycott,” but didn’t cite any lists specifically.

This morning, The New York Times blog “The Lede” rescinded their own Twi-ported version of the story, actually contacting one of the Twitter users and asking whether the whole iced tea boycott was a gag.

It was.

Update 2 | Thursday | 9:32 a.m. Mr. Nichols just got in touch with The Lede and confirmed that, yes, he was joking when he called Arizona Iced Tea “the drink of fascists” on Twitter on Tuesday. He added that he was traveling for work yesterday and had no idea, until checking his e-mail at the end of the day, that his comment — which was inspired, he said, by the Twitter-based comic musings of @conanobrien and @colsonwhitehead — was being taken seriously by critics of Arizona boycotts and the media.

While saying that he did not think that suggesting a boycott of Arizona Iced Tea was his best joke — “As a joke I would give it a C minus” — Mr. Nichols expressed shock that his comment could spread so far so fast before anyone got in touch with him to confirm that he was not kidding, or even looked closely at his other comments on Twitter. It seemed to him, he said, that people writing on the Web sites of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh simply wanted evidence to support their theory that liberals are idiots and the idea that there was a misguided campaign to boycott Iced Tea was, as they used to say in the news business, too good to check.

Update | Thursday | 7:45 a.m. After this post was published, more evidence emerged to suggest that @travisjnichols was perhaps not entirely serious about crippling Arizona’s economy by leading a Twitter-driven boycott of AriZona Iced Tea. Mr. Nichols added these updates to his Twitter feed late on Wednesday:

The party game of fascists? The limbo. #thedrinkoffascists

The movie of fascists? Rush Hour 3. #thedrinkoffascists.

The drug of fascists? Oxycontin! #thedrinkoffascists.

He also changed his biography on the social-networking site to read simply: “I am totally serious. And American.”

As one one veteran journalism professor used to tell me and the rest of his under-performing students: “It’s called reporting…Try it sometime.”

Tags : arizona, arizona boycott, arizona iced tea, sb 1070

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