What's this all about?
ABC/Disney plans to memorialize the fifth anniversary of 9/11 with a fictional docudrama called "The Path to 9/11". Written by an avowed right-wing activist, this work of fiction directly contradicts the accepted record of the 9/11 Commission Report. President Clinton and former administration officials were denied an advance copy; Rush Limbaugh and obscure right-wing bloggers saw it last week. ABC plans to distribute this docudrama to 100,000 educators across the country. We've set up this site to encourage ABC to change its strategy. READ MORE.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

On Disney's Ties to the Political Right

Digby has an imporant post on Disney's behavior with regards to partisan politics and liberalism. Disney likes to hide behind the veneer of being a liberal entertainment company, and is only too happy to have wingnuts like Hugh Hewitt publishing internal emails pretending like Disney is a bunch of hippy Clinton-loving liberals. The record is starkly different.

Disney blocked its Miramax division from distributing a Michael Moore film, claiming that "it's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle." Disney executives are high dollar donors to Bush, were going to make holocaust-denier and anti-semite Mel Gibson's nonfiction miniseries series on the holocaust, and canceled a reality show with a gay couple because James Dobsen threatened to pull his support for the conservative movie and expensive potential franchise movie Narnia. Does this sound like a bunch of liberals to you? I don't think so.

Disney/ABC is a major multinational corporation with deep political interests. Their most prominent political demand is for an extreme copyright extension, and they even have a law named after their signature character, Mickey Mouse, whose likeness should have passed into the public domain a long time ago. At this point it's simply political corruption that allows Disney to profit from works that are part of public popular culture, and we know which party is home to political corruption and blind corporate support.

Richard Iger, watch where you're treading.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Matt, there really isn't any support for citing Mel Gibson as a Holocaust denier, and your link doesn't provide it. Mel's father, Hutton, definitely is that, and Mel declines to repudiate his father's pernicious views. Basically, he won't answer questions about that subject.

Mel is an anti-Semite, but he has steered clear of stating or affirming that the Holocaust did not occur.

Just thought given the purpose of this site, strict accuracy should prevail.

7:28 PM  
Blogger Helponaut said...

Um, yes he is. He takes a more tactful approach, but he uses the modern version which is to say it's complicated and people just kind of die in wartime.

"On the Holocaust: "The thing with him [my father] was that he was talking about numbers. I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it's four. I mean it's that kind of numbers game.""

Oh, it's so confusing with all those numbers, who knows what really happened?

8:43 PM  
Blogger Michael said...

It's Robert Iger, not Richard.

8:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Numbers Game??"

Fuzzy math rears it's head!

And anti-semitism.

9:33 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well Matt, that quote is problematic, and I was already aware of it -- I was raised in the same virulent "Traditionalist Catholic" sect Mel belongs to, so I tend to track these things. But the fact remains that he has not, at least not publicly, denied that the Holocaust occurred. He simply will not repudiate his father, who does a great deal more than merely "question numbers."

But even if you think you are justified in your claim about Mel, you should link to something other than that NYT article in support.

3:34 PM  

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