In a key scene in Citizen Kane, an outraged financial adviser warns Kane that his recently-purchased newspaper lost a million dollars in the last year. Kane replies mirthfully that he expects to lose a million next year, too. “At the rate of a million a year we’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” The message is that Kane is more interested in being able to peddle influence than in protecting his inherited wealth.
This is the same strategy that the modern woke-media, Hollywood especially, have long been pursuing. As Ben Shapiro details in Prime-Time Propaganda, Hollywood has long decided that peddling woke politics is more important than turning a profit. They’ve only upped the ante in recent years, promoting dog after dog and losing money, and especially killing off beloved, profitable franchises, in the name of “diversity”.
The only question has been: how much money are they prepared to lose in order to push THE MESSAGE (as YouTuber TheCriticalDrinker dubs it). Well, we’re starting to get an idea.
Last week, Netflix issued a long memo detailing the company culture it hopes to foster: The streaming service lays out that it produces a variety of content and won’t allow its employees to cut programming.
Netflix lets “viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.”
And if the employee doesn’t like it, there’s the door. “Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”
This is an obvious reference to Netflix employees picketing their own workplace in protest at Dave Chappelle’s hugely popular stand-up comedy specials. The same has happened in other industries, especially publishing.
Now, it used to be that if you didn’t like the job, you knew where the door was. It looks as though, when it comes to choosing between pandering to woke millennials and staying afloat, Netflix management have finally remembered who’s the boss.
They’ve also remembered that, at the end of the day, even Hollywood is a business. There’s more than a whiff of self-interest in Netflix’s new-found commitment to free expression. The streaming service shed 200, 000 subscribers in just the first quarter of 2022 and shed about $40 billion of its stock value. No small part of the mass exodus is its price: Netflix is easily the most expensive streaming service.
But its woke politics are compounding its woes.
The Netflix memo made news because it’s now seen as bold to stand up for free speech and open discourse. It seems so novel, letting viewers, and not 23-year-old gender-studies majors in their first job, pick what to watch.
It’s being seen, along with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, as part of a growing backlash against the censorship and cancel culture that has festered ever since the 80s gave us “political correctness”.
But, if Hollywood is slowly getting the memo, Washington is still ploughing ahead with its plans to outlaw ThoughtCrime.
The Biden administration continues to plow on with its Disinformation Governance Board. Nicknamed “Ministry of Truth,” from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” the DGB is folded under the Department of Homeland Security. Wrongthink is a threat to our national security, you see.
Nina Jankowicz, President Biden’s pick to run the ministry, is particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories, having herself fallen for several.
As Benjamin Weingarten described in The Post last week, she’s “an unrepentant Russiagate collusion-monger who praised the former British spy behind the discredited Steele dossier. Jankowicz also amplified the ultimate in election-interfering disinformation — that the New York Post’s censored-but-true Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.”
She also suggested that verified users of Twitter should be able to “edit” other people’s tweets for “context.” Even more alarming, Jankowicz thinks that some people shouldn’t be “verified” on Twitter because they’re “untrustworthy.”
New York Post
Given Jankowicz’ record, we might say that it takes one to know one.