Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly takes on the industry’s passing parade.
A busy week — including fallen Democrat kingpin Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Santa Barbara confab of the great minds behind Trump’s military defense program, Elon Musk’s continued race-based war against The Odyssey and a big scoop from the guys at Variety. But first… What a difference a year makes! In Hollywood, anyway. Coming late and no doubt reluctantly to the battle, Disney is now fully engaged as the company is forced to face the fact that the Trumpists are not joking about punishing them for Jimmy Kimmel’s insolence, The View‘s “bias” and whatever else is under their skin. (Wait until they find out about that Will Trent cliffhanger.) This lede from Reuters would have been incredible in any other time — the biggest thing to happen to Hollywood all year. But now it’s barely noticed.
WASHINGTON, May 11 (Reuters) – The Trump administration is engaged in a targeted effort to censor Disney and its ABC network through a series of sweeping regulatory actions, the only Democrat on the Federal Communications Commission said on Monday. “What Disney and ABC are facing is not a series of coincidental regulatory actions but a sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control, carried out through the weaponization of the FCC’s authority as a federal regulator and aimed at pressuring a free and independent press and all media into submission,” FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez wrote in a letter to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro. |
Rather than seek to accommodate or bury its head in the sand, Disney is actually fighting back, filing a petition with the FCC saying that, “The Commission’s actions threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly.”
I mean, it’s all you can ask for from the new Mouse Boss, whom I’m sure has things he’d rather be dealing with in his first weeks on the job — but hats off to him for recognizing that if you’re going to be in this business, you have to actually stand up for its underlying principles, and letting a bully push you around only guarantees that bully is going to come back for more and more. I’m sure the tech bros, while chaperoning their king to China, are chuckling at the naivete of Disney for picking this fight, when if you just make your peace with the big guy — good favor and government goodies can be showered upon you like you never dared to dream. But with Trump’s approval in the mid-30s just a year into his term, and falling… 
…they might consider that the time when the public is going to turn on all those who abetted whatever kind of cronyist handouts are going on, it might be coming sooner than they think. And the public might even demand some answers about what has been happening, with an outcry so great that even Bari Weiss and the Washington Post editorial page can’t turn back the tide for you. Now, onto the rest of this week’s jamboree, starting with Santa Barbara…
Restorative WeekendJeffrey Katzenberg has recently found himself on the outs of Hollywood, with no studio to wield power, defender of Casey Wasserman, and last but not least, a storyteller about Joe Biden’s health with donors, even likening him to Mufasa, a deception that outraged Hollywood. But as they say, when god closes one door, he opens a window…
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