Should You Patronize Our Advertisers?

Many publications fill the bottom of their columns with a bold-face statement, “Patronize our Advertisers.” But whether or not a magazine says so explicitly, every publication wants you to patronize its advertisers. If you don’t, they stop advertising. BAR, too, wants you to patronize our advertisers. Their advertisements make our magazine more interesting. They provide you with useful information about worthwhile products and services. Without the income from these advertisements, we could not do all the things BAR does.

Having said all this—you may already know what I am going to say now—BAR is different. We have distinctive problems. We try to find principled solutions. And we struggle with our dilemmas in public. In at least one instance, we are going to advise our readers not to patronize an advertiser. (Has any other magazine ever done that?)

In our letters column, we print six letters criticizing us for accepting particular ads. (Most magazines would regard printing such letters as biting the hand that feeds you.) These ads appeared in our BAR 16:02 issue. They included an ad for a wall chart called the World History Chart, featuring the dates of past events, and an ad insert for information on the abortion controversy. In the May/June issue we printed a letter objecting to an ad for a book entitled Gospel Fictions. (See “Objects to Ad,” Queries & Comments, BAR 16:03.)