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Disney Reaps What It Sows
Four weeks ago ESPN personality Jemele Hill took on President Trump in a series of Tweets (condensed into a single quote here):
“Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists. The height of white privilege is being able to ignore his white supremacy, because it’s of no threat to you. Well, it’s a threat to me. Trump is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy. Period.”
The honchos at the network declined to discipline her, although they have a long history of suspending and publicly admonishing talent for “controversial” conservative opinions or generally criticizing the network for their liberal politics. Former World Series hero Curt Schilling was fired for his opinions on the North Carolina bathroom bill and it emerged that long-time SportsCenter anchor Linda Cohn was suspended for merely suggesting politics had a hand in the network’s falling subscriber rolls.
“That is definitely a percentage of it,” Cohn said on WABC’s Bernie and Sid, “I don’t know how big a percentage, but if anyone wants to ignore that fact, they’re blind.” Clay Travis of Outkick the Coverage reported that Cohn was told by ESPN president John Skipper to “stay home and think about” what she said.
Left: Bob Iger (Fortune) Right: John Skipper (Hollywood Reporter)
Bob Iger, the president of ESPN’s parent, The Walt Disney Company, defended the non-discipline of Hill. “I felt we needed to take into account what other people at ESPN were feeling at this time,” he told The New York Times, “and that resulted in not taking action.”
According to my sources inside the network, ESPN did consider suspending Hill but no one would take her shift on the 6ET SportsCenter, so that may account for the “others” line.
Iger is rumored to be interested in the 2020 Democratic nomination and also defended Jimmy Kimmel’s anti-GOP tirades, adding “But I think he should be careful.” And Disney has also declined to comment on whether or not they were party to any of the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment settlements when that company owned Miramax.
This weekend Hill was back on her Twitter account and evidently Iger and Skipper have had enough.
The seeds were sown last night as the Dallas Cowboys fell to the Green Bay Packers. With the NFL’s ratings falling and their brand taking a major hit with the anthem controversy, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told reporters, “If there’s anything that is disrespectful to the flag, then we will not play, understand? We will not. If we are disrespecting the flag, then we will not play. Period… We’re going to respect the flag and I’m going to create the perception of it. And we have.”
Sunday on Twitter, Hill unloaded on Jones. “This play always work. Change happens when advertisers are impacted. If you feel strongly about JJ’s statement, boycott his advertisers.” She attached a partial list including AT&T, Bank of America, the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Ford Motor Company, MillerCoors, and PepsiCo.
Funny thing about Cowboys advertisers, they’re also ESPN advertisers. They don’t take kindly to having the networks they spend millions of dollars on urging consumer boycotts of them. ESPN’s statement reads:
Jemele Hill has been suspended for two weeks for a second violation of our social media guidelines. She previously acknowledged letting her colleagues and company down with an impulsive tweet. In the aftermath, all employees were reminded of how individual tweets may reflect negatively on ESPN and that such actions would have consequences. Hence this decision.
There is no principle behind this. It is purely craven survival mode. But it’s exactly what ESPN deserves.
ESPN doesn’t just “cover” liberal activism, they promote and facilitate it. If you go to the network’s website you’ll find a section called “espnW.” It’s not just a section on women’s sports. It is a hotbed of liberal activism.
Every year ESPN hosts the espnW: Women + Sports Summit. In recapping this year’s event, Alyssa Roenigk writes:
For the past year, I’ve had the privilege of helping to run our Athlete Activism impact group: a diverse collection of passionate, involved women who are interested in having tough, uncomfortable, necessary conversations about the changing landscape of activism in this country. We discuss the fears that often paralyze female athletes who want to use their voices and brainstorm ways in which we can better support women in sports when they feel empowered to speak up.
During this year’s work session, the discussion continually circled back to the importance of education and youth athletes. Over and again, someone in the room charged us at espnW with finding ways to better educate young people not only on the changing dynamic of modern activism, but on why it is important to stand up for others and the long history of activism in sports that has brought us all to this moment in time.
Get them young, indoctrinate them, and turn them into fist-raising, anthem-kneeling radicals.
Disney is reaping what they have been actively sowing. And giving us all another reason to cut the cord.
Published in Culture
“Values that seemed timeless, true without question, become monstrous almost overnight. What was normal yesterday becomes unclean today. The issues seem to pop from nowhere then suddenly appear everywhere, with a uniformity of thought that amazes. Occasionally sharing he same phrases. An orchestrated mob.”
This.
That’s not relevant. There’s a lot of people who are well known outside of my sphere of knowledge.
The point behind the posting is the “never apologize, never take responsibilty” line. This is the way of the left. Everything is always someone else’s fault. This is how they advance the ball. They make us apologize constantly and we’re at fault for everything.
As Ace of Spades pointed out on his blog last night the real battlefield is the culture war.
“The left has decided that it can’t win the political war on the current battlefield, so it has made it its mission to shape the battlefield by taking over the main transmission stations of permissible public opinion and using the power of those corporations to propagandize and bully citizens into compliance.
“That is the war. Some on the Not-So-SmartSet right may proudly pat themselves on the back for avoiding that war, denying the existence of that war, and even white knighting corporations actively fighting that war on behalf of the left — but that is the actual war.
“And, as to any conservative too polite to fight the actual war — then what is the point of you, and whose side are you actually on?”
The great irony of this “Disney–but for ‘grown-ups'” show is that the morality is infantile post-modern rubbish. The half of a season I watched, it became clear that the only virtue the characters pursued was each individual’s own happiness. Since this selfish hedonism was pursued by both the “good” and the “bad,” the two became virtually indistinguishable, and thus all unlikeable. This is in great contrast to many of their animated movies for children, which often purvey moral lessons with some depth and nuance. (I do not include The Little Mermaid on this list–she’s the worst.)
I follow sports rather closely, and it’s relevant to his degree of influence that I’ve never heard of him. As to the “never apologize” question, I agree with your take, and the remainder of my post indicates why Zirin is patently wrong in this instance.
Brandon Esch, the former head of Firefox was forced out of his job for donating $1,000 to support the marriage initiative in 2008 in California. He resigned in 2014. He was outed as having the wrong view. It isn’t radical, nor narrowly held even after the SCOTUS made gay marriage legal. But, the left knows that they have the force of the law to push their agendas. They don’t care about public debate when they can go to court and win the favor of government force. So, if you are a leftist, you are very free to declare anything that advances the left agenda without recourse. The NFL is the first left group that I can think of to suffer the loss of public goodwill and most importantly be threatened with punitive action that they cannot lobby or control. The public signaled that they were getting fed up when they put Trump in office, and they seem to be saying they are getting full up of the leftist nonsense. Hollywood just had a crappy summer too.
I theorize that the only thing keeping Bill Clinton from joining the Bill Cosby Harvey Weinstien club is that he was a President, and we don’t like to create political prisoners in this country.
There are two Americas; one that gets to have the first amendment, and one that doesn’t.
The very best thing about Trump is that he doesn’t seem to care and doesn’t grovel to get in with the popular kids. It appears that when he engages in the eighth grade behavior that is the left’s tactic, he becomes the popular kid. Hey he has guts, he just said that and didn’t blink an eye. Sometimes being a megalomaniac has advantages. He does, however, fall easily to flattery, which is troublesome.
Here’s another one. Where do they find these people?
Wilbon is a columnist for the WaPost. He and his partner Tony Kornheiser (another Post-toastie before pursuing radio full time) are good friends with the Obamas. Their show, Pardon the Interruption (or PTI for short) tapes in a studio in downtown Washington DC.
As a friend of mine at the network once noted you can’t spell “Piece of s___” without the letters PTI.
The irony of all this, as I point out in my latest satirical offering, is that the military and professional athletics are the best means for advancement for African Americans. By disrespecting one and making the other unpopular, they are only hurting themselves.
My brilliant wife had a great idea. Have an African American veteran come in to sing the National Anthem. When the announcement is made for everyone to rise, he/she would not start until all the players were standing. Let’s see how that turns out.
Yeah, but our America still has the second.
The fights over policy are like the battles on the ramparts and the cultural war is being fought in the sappers tunnels under the walls. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your policy analysis is if the foundations are destroyed.
I guess I should admit that other than actual football games, I literally never tune in to ESPN. Never have. Even when I tune in for football it’s because they happen to be carrying one of the narrow subset of games I care about. Once Amazon starts streaming everything, ESPN will be entirely redundant in my view.
You forget Target and their bathroom controversy…. It’s worked before. It just doesn’t get the publicity because it doesn’t fit the Pravda of the MSM.
Hilarious contrast in that article with what happened to Chick-fil-a. As much as these corporations try to bully us, at the end of the day, we’re their masters. No matter how profoundly they infect these institutions, they serve us and are forced to produce things we like.
It is economics plain and simple. Ms. Hill attacked the Cowboys and their advertisers. It would be prudent for Ms. Hill to understand that the top 5 most watched NFL games of 2016 included the Dallas Cowboys. I know I am a life long Cowboy fan but as the Boys go, so goes the NFL.
I think I agree with your underlying economic premise, but I’m not so sure about your football premise. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Out here outside the “metroplex” there are a lot of people watching other teams.
@boilermaker has a point. The ‘boys haven’t won a Super Bowl since 1996 and still rank in the top 5 of merchandise sales. Four Dallas players rank in the current top 10 of jersey sales.
Ah yes, one of my first posts. I still haven’t shopped there, and I am now convinced I never will.
Well, 84 Lumber got hurt, but I never saw the numbers, after the “Wall” commercial from the Super Bowl.
Also, Coca-Cola got hurt, but again I haven’t looked for the numbers, when they made the “any language is fine in America” commercial.