It's important to always remember that the big Hollywood media companies are not people. They don't hold any particular political stances, other than those which help the bottom line. Hollywood is much like every other industry in the United States. Faced with two choices, it will always choose the road less likely to cause bad publicity or impact the bottom line. Don't confuse feel-good PR campaigns or highly-promoted diversity initiatives with having an actual moral stance on gender, racial or LGTBQ issues. It's all about the money, no matter what any individual executive might believe personally.
Disney's very public battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis came about in part because internal pressure from employees forced Disney CEO Bob Chapek to come out against the state's so-called "Don't Say Gay" law. He didn't want to make the move because I suspect he knew what was coming: a rainstorm of culture battle arguments that would impact Disney's business.
In the wake of the blowback, the conventional wisdom both inside and outside the entertainment industry is the takeaway from this exchange is big media companies should stay out of politics. And what people really mean when they say "stay out of politics" is that Hollywood should stay out of any issue that has even a remote connection to gender, race or sexual identity. That point of view is best described in this tweet from Rich Lowry, who is the editor of the National Review:
It's the "stay quiet or I'll shoot this dog" approach to politics. Conservatives in Florida were acting not out of real outrage or even practical political machinations - the bill was already law before Gov. DeSantis pushed the state legislature to revoke Disney's special tax district. And there certainly wasn't any factual reason to begin referring to Disney World employees as "groomers" or pedophiles. This is all about fear. It's about making the price of supporting diversity so high that corporations will be scared off from doing anything but the occasional Black History month campaign.
The problem with cowering to this mob is that recent American history has shown us that winning a battle isn't enough. Like hostage-takers everywhere, the cultural purists of the conservative movement see this as a literal do-or-die cultural war. And once you win one battle, you don't celebrate. You move on to your next target. Republican legislatures move to restrict abortions, then move on to birth control. And now there are Republican legislators arguing that frozen embryos should be considered people and should be "adopted" and brought to term, even if the donors disagree.
Moves against trans athletes in high school quickly evolved into anti-trans laws, then laws that targeted same-sex couples. It didn't take long for concerns that schools were teaching Critical Race Theory to evolve into complaints that teaching about Rosa Parks made white students "feel bad" and that any book for children that portrays same sex parents wasn't appropriate for school libraries.
Corporate executives might see "say no evil" as the economically prudent response to what the state of Florida has rained down on Disney. But media companies can't save themselves by hiding and declining to engage with critics.
Discovery's TLC Network has aired seven seasons of the series I Am Jazz, which starred transgender teen Jazz Jennings. But while the company didn't have a problem making a lot of money off of Jennings's story, they don't seem to be concerned that school districts in Florida and elsewhere plan to remove her books from school libraries because conservatives now consider them transgender propaganda. And how long will it be before they begin targeting individual TV shows?
Universal Studios Orlando is the second-largest park in Florida and executives have declined to weigh in on the State of Florida's fight with rival Disney. Even to say something as non-confrontational as "we don't believe the government should target companies strictly because politicians don't agree with a company policy." I'm sure Universal executives believe that by staying silent, they can buy themselves some good will with the cultural jihadists running the state of Florida.
But what will they do when the inevitable happens? When some legislator somewhere disagrees with the sexual identity of a character in a Disney movie or argues that some PR campaign is promoting same-sex couples at the expense of heterosexual ones? What happens the next time Discovery wants to launch a show like I Am Jazz and the governor of Florida starts making speeches arguing the show is essentially grooming?
I agree that media companies don't need to go out of their way to provoke conservatives. They should be as politically neutral as possible. But neutrality only works in an environment where diversity is possible. When one side starts arguing that merely mentioning same sex relationships is wrong, then lines have already been drawn.
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