This is an important trend, but as usual the news people have slanted it to their own benefit: Advertisers are not blacklisting "hard news", they're just fed up with their brands being associated with negative, sensationalist reporting.

These types of blacklists are good, especially if they ideally force media companies to drop the emotional clap-trap and get back to proper reporting and journalism.

Media has always been manipulative, but it's become incredibly heightened in the deathmatch for eyeballs and ad clicks. If the ad-buying companies continue this pushback, perhaps the media companies will start reporting the news in a more neutral & factual way.

Yup interesting trend. The real story is the public has made this happen.

Given the kind of cut throat competition that exists, Marketing manager don't really get "fed up". They are more focused on hitting their weekly numbers, than on where the numbers come from. It's all the screen grabs and naming and shaming on social media that makes them notice and change tack.

I see the public pressure getting more organized and targeted in future.

Reading Gramna, I get the sense that Cuba is a country where no one dies, there is no public corruption, and the infrastructure is fine. Censorship is an amazing thing.

The thing about sensationalism is that on some level, people think they are being well informed.

If you look at the blacklists they're using, they're going to hit basically all news that even touches on politics. That's bad, because it'll prevent news companies from informing voters. When blacklists begin including words like "Brexit", "Trump", "Crash", "Accident", etc. it begins to have a real impact on outlets that are reporting on current events. This leads to crap like "The 10 retirement mistakes that Millenials are making!"