Lego has said it would no longer run toy giveaways with the Daily Mail in response to a parent complaining of the newspaper’s “unashamed discrimination.”
Facebook user Bob Jones wrote to the Danish toy company last week and raised concerns about Lego’s tie-ins with the newspaper in light of headlines that he said: “Create distrust of foreigners, blame immigrants for everything, and as of yesterday are now having a go at top judges in the UK for being gay while making a legal judgement.”
In a post that was shared on the social media site 22,000 times, he wrote: “Lego, to me has always been an inclusive product,” and asked the company whether it intended to continue brand partnerships with the Daily Mail.
“We have finished the agreement with the Daily Mail and are not planning any future promotional activity with the newspaper,” the company responded on Saturday on both Twitter and Facebook.
The company sent the same message to Stop Funding Hate, a campaign group that has been urging companies including John Lewis and the Co-Op to stop advertising in papers that it says are running “divisive hate campaigns.”
“We spend a lot of time listening to what children have to say. And when parents and grandparents take the time to let us know how they feel, we always listen just as carefully,” a Lego spokeswoman told reporters.
The company has no plans for further promotional activity with the paper “in the foreseeable future,” she added.
“Our agreement with Lego has finished and we have no plans around any promotional activity with Lego in the foreseeable future,” a spokesman for the Daily Mail said.
The paper has run giveaways of toys for the past two or three years, he said.
He emphasized that the agreement had run its course and there was no threat by Lego to pull advertising.
On Friday, Gary Lineker, the star of Walkers advertisements, said he had held talks with the food brand about its advertising in the Sun, following a spat between the former soccer player and the newspaper over his views on the refugee crisis.
He said people would have to “wait and see” about the outcome, but Walkers said: “Our advertising approach is not determined by the editorial stances of individual newspapers.”
Stop Funding Hate cofounder Rosey Ellum welcomed Lego’s announcement.
Stop Funding Hate started in August out of concerns at coverage of issues including the refugee crisis in parts of the media.
“The starting point was that we saw a situation where basically these newspapers were being more and more hateful towards certain groups,” Ellum said.
Ellum rejected the suggestion that the campaign risked indirect censorship by giving brands influence over reporting.
“We wouldn’t ask brands to have any say over editorial decisions,” she said. “Companies choose not to advertise in lots of publications, for example pornography. They make these decisions every day.”
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