Quiz: "pull" or "pull off"?

The correct answer is:

pull

Ford, the carmaker, has decided to pull all advertising from the News of the World.

If a company pulls advertising, it cancels or stops an advertisement or an advertising campaign. We talk about companies that “pull an ad” or “pull a campaign”.

The big story of the week in the UK is about the alleged phone hacking by a British tabloid. It is alleged that a private investigator working for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World hacked into the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, while she was still missing. He listened to her parent's desperate messages and deleted some of the older voice messages, thereby tampering with the evidence. This gave false hope to the parents and led them and the police to believe that the child was still alive. 

Phone hacking is not new to the British press — the News of the World has already paid huge damages for its involvement in the hacking of a number of phones belonging to celebrities, including actor Jude Law and football star Paul Gascoigne — but these new allegations have caused outrage in the British public. When the victims were seen to be "rich" celebrities, many people didn't show too much concern. Now that an innocent family has been targeted, the public backlash could be devastating for the paper. David Cameron, the British prime minister, has called the hacking "a truly dreadful act".

Sensing that it may not be a good thing to be associated with the newspaper at the moment, Ford has decided to pull its adverts from the paper. In a statement explaining its decision, Ford said that it was “a company which cares about the standards of behaviour of its own people and those it deals with externally”. Other firms, including T-Mobile, are also considering whether to pull their advertisements from future editions of the paper.

If you pull something off, you are successful in trying to do something. 

Learn more about the increasing control of Rupert Murdoch over the British press and at internet hacking: Media threats.