The Fall of the House of Mouse Within days, Disney was rocked by scandals at ABC News (The View) and ESPN (Sugar Bowl coverage), becoming a slow-motion train wreck. By Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann
https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/09/the-fall-of-the-house-of-mouse/
The legendary Walt Disney, watching from above, must be disgusted with what’s happened at the company he founded more than 100 years ago, October 16, 1923, to be exact. Under the leadership of Bob Iger for most of the past 20 years, the company has recently floundered, abandoning its roots in providing wholesome entertainment across its many platforms (theme parks, cruise lines, movies, broadcasting, streaming entertainment) and is now seen for what it has become, a woke institution dedicated to indoctrinating children. And parents have rebelled.
100 years ago, Walt Disney had a vision: to provide wholesome entertainment for families and “children of all ages.” He oversaw the creation of endearing classic movies, theme parks that allowed visitors to enter a whole new world, and his namesake brand of quality kid-safe content. It became world-famous for its uniquely “Disney” way of entertaining everyone. From his unabashedly patriotic content generated during World War II to the “Wonderful World of Disney” that brought families together in front of the TV beginning in the late 1950s, Walt’s world was shaped by his “America First” beliefs.
But all that has changed under the leadership of current CEO Bob Iger. Iger, who joined ABC (the American Broadcasting Company) in 1974, earning $175 a week, has steadily risen through the ranks at ABC through a series of positions at Capital Cities/ABC before it was acquired by Disney in 1995. His rise up toward the C-suite continued unabated until 2005 when the Walt Disney Board selected him to succeed the unpopular Michael Eisner as its CEO.
Since then he has presided over a period of rapid growth in its theme parks division as well as masterminding the acquisition of several intellectual property portfolios—Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel, to name a few—to bolster its standing in Hollywood and become a dominating force in the entertainment industry.
But as of late, since the late 2010s, the company has become a leading force in the woke movement, which has caused problems for the company. It has run into a buzz saw of criticism over its forced introduction of LGBTQIA+ themes and characters into its TV programming and films.
Several past and present Disney executives, including Latoya Raveneau and Karey Burke, have been caught online espousing how they want to make Disney entertainment more LGBTQIA+ friendly, usurping parents’ ability to introduce these topics, especially to younger, more impressionable children, at a time these parents deem appropriate. (Note that both of the videos were distributed over Disney’s internal communications network, complete with sign language interpretations.) This seizure of parental rights prompted one parent to write this about Raveneau, “I’d rather take my five-year-old daughter to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre than watch woke Disney content,” while another parent said about Burke, “What a dangerous woman. I’d like to let you know that we’ve canceled our Disney+ subscription.”
Disney, once known as America’s babysitter, faced massive blowback once parents learned of its secret gay and transgender content being inserted into its entertainment. Much of this criticism has come from conservative pundits like Blaze Media’s Christopher Ruffo.
But cutting away from this topic, let’s look at the Disney train wreck over the past two weeks. First is its $16 million settlement to the Trump Presidential Library to make Good Morning America (produced by ABC News) co-host George Stephanopoulos’ defamation lawsuit go away. It was so humiliating as many media outlets criticized the move, saying it would set a dangerous precedent.
Disney settled for one reason: it feared discovery in court-ordered depositions in the Trump lawsuit that would force it to hand over incriminating emails and internal communications that would disclose its bias. With a new administration about to come on board, they wanted to avoid a much more costly settlement that might run into hundreds of millions of dollars, like the almost $800 million Fox News-Dominion settlement.
Another one of Disney’s lightning rods has been its popular daytime talk show, The View. Co-hosted by a rotating cast of left-wing yentas (with some token so-called conservative RINO co-hosts thrown in for what Disney claims are ideological balance), it has routinely been a cathartic mess of far-left shrieking and ad hominem attacks on anyone to the right of Che Guevara. By lamely tacking to the center, the show fears it will lose its core audience of predominantly female daytime TV viewers getting their fix of left-wing confirmation bias while alienating everyone else.
Since the election, the most egregious culprit has been Sunny Hostin. Repeatedly, like Stephanopoulos, she’s had producers screaming in her earpiece to tone things down. And like with Stephanopoulos, she’s ignored them, resulting in a series of hostage-style on-air video “clarifications” where the dour-faced Hostin has been forced to offer up her mea culpa to prevent the network from being sued, much to the delight of conservatives sick of being vilified.
(Given Hostin’s recent on-air rant equating J6 with the Holocaust, their have been calls for ABC News to suspend or remove her from the View. But she is facing more trouble as the Daily Mail justrevealed that Hostin’s husband, Dr. Emmanual Hostin, has found himself in legal hot water caught up in a sweeping RICO insurance fraud investigation.)
We expect The View will go the way of late-night lefties Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers once Trump’s incoming head of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is confirmed. He’s expected to propose removing Big Pharma television advertising and ABC/Disney cannot justify eight-figure annual payouts to each host.
On Friday, just two days after the terrorist attack in New Orleans, at the one-day-delayed Sugar Bowl at the New Orleans Superdome, ESPN decided to go to a commercial break instead of covering the moment of silence, the singing of the National Anthem, and the teams, Penn State and Notre Dame, coming on to the field waving the American flag. The producers in the trucks chose to run another insipid Allstate commercial, the primary sponsor of the Sugar Bowl (and whose CEO Tom Wilson came in for his share of ridicule over his clueless pregame message prompting calls for a boycott).
ESPN has been attacked by conservative analysts ranging from the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, Sirius/XM’s Megyn Kelly, and Outkick founder Clay Travis over its Sugar Bowl coverage. It should be noted in its aftermath that not a single NFL game over the final regular-season weekend dared cut away from the national anthem. Such is the power of the New Media, as it was hard to find any left-wing outlet like the hate-America crowd at MSDNC (also known as MSNBC) that dared criticize ESPN’s decision to cut away.
The leadership at ABC News and ESPN has a lot to answer for. It should be noted that Disney Entertainment is helmed by long-time executive Dana Walden, who introduced Vice President Kamala Harris to First Gentleman Doug Emhoff. Until recently, she was widely expected to replace Bob Iger to be CEO. Those hopes were dashed when Trump trounced Harris in a mandate-producing landslide. Even Iger and the Disney Board are not so stupid that they would move forward with Walden with the prospect of a Trump-led FCC giving it a forensic ideological proctology exam since ABC’s broadcast licenses are reviewed by the commission.
The situation at ESPN isn’t a whole lot better. Under the guidance of James Pitaro since 2018, it has been suffering massive audience losses as it can no longer strong-arm cable operators to pay huge carriage fees (up to $8 per subscriber). It’s bleeding red ink as the landscape moves from cable to streaming. ESPN’s strategies, as have been with its Disney+/Hulu entertainment properties, have been a disaster. It’s gotten so bad at ESPN that the network, once known as the “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” is now known as the “Worldwide Leader in Woke” instead. All this is documented daily on the WDW Pro Channel on YouTube.
Walt Disney would never have damaged his brand to placate fringe weirdos and their kinky desires to get next to your kids, grooming them. He would have never allowed gay and transgender characters to be inserted into entertainment directed at children. And he would have avoided the polarizing effect of broadcasting the opinions of radicals and their crackpot conspiracies and anti-American screeds within his enterprise.
But Walt is long gone, a historical footnote at a company that continues to use his name and tarnish his legacy by pushing anti-family and anti-American narratives in service to a sliver of its potential audience. The House of Mouse is reducing itself to being just another foolish woke enterprise that can only fail its customers, feeding off its heritage until there is nobody left to buy what it is selling.
Comments are closed.
