Before there was the Q&A boycott, there was the Alan Jones boycott.
It was 2012 and the talkback king was under fire for telling the Sydney University Liberal Club that the father of then-prime minister Julia Gillard had "died of shame".
Spooked by the social media fury, advertisers fled from the program. Labor MPs refused to be interviewed by Jones, with none appearing for at least six months (many have never gone back on the program).
Tony Abbott, then opposition leader, described Jones' comments as "wrong, unacceptable, offensive".
But when asked whether he would boycott Jones' show, he said he would not. It was all about the numbers.
"I am certainly not going to ignore an audience of half a million people in Sydney," Mr Abbott said.
Joe Hockey, then the shadow treasurer, agreed.
It would be "the height of arrogance to say you're going to boycott some sort of radio show that has an audience of 5, 6, 700,000 Australians", Mr Hockey explained.
According to the most recent Sydney radio ratings figures, Jones had a cumulative audience of 435,000 for the April to June survey period, meaning that many listeners tuned in each week. His average audience was 145,000 - the number of people listening to the program at a given time.
Meanwhile, Q&A had an average audience of 967,000 viewers nationally and 777,000 viewers in the capital cities for a March episode featuring Julie Bishop and Annabel Crabb. Q&A had 560,000 metro viewers for the controversial episode featuring Zaky Mallah, one of its lower-rating shows.
(Radio and television use slightly different ratings methodologies, meaning they should only be compared broadly.)
The clippings files also unearthed this quote from Mr Abbott in 2011, when the Gillard government was in one of its many stoushes with News Ltd.
Mr Abbott told radio host Ray Hadley that "we don't run jihads against the people we don't agree with. We simply take the ordinary course of action open to us. If you don't like The Sydney Morning Herald, you don't buy it. You don't run a jihad against it. This is the problem. I mean, in the end, in a robust democracy - there's got to be a range of views. We will better come at truth the more vigorous the debate is beforehand and I just think there is a real problem at the moment with trying to shout down people who you don't agree with."
Context, of course, is everything. As Mr Abbott once said - on Q&A no less, while quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson - "a foolish consistency is a hobgoblin for tiny minds".
