Posts Tagged ‘abc news’

The Messy House of Mouse

Posted: January 30, 2024 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

After 15 years at ABC News, I left the company after Disney took control. 

The House of Mouse’s heavy-handed influence over ABC became clear to me when I was prevented from using footage of Disney World when I was doing a story about a crime committed there.

As a result, I’m happy to see that Disney is a mess!

–CEO Bob Iger had to return from retirement in 2022 after his handpicked successor had mismanaged the company. Now, Iger must find a new successor.

–Various questionable investments, such as the acquisition of Fox Entertainment and losses from streaming services, have affected the bottom line.

–Iger faces a major proxy battle because Disney’s shares are trading at their lowest point in a decade.

“Iger is a little over a year into his second stint as CEO, and his return to the House of Mouse isn’t going as planned. The decline of Disney’s long-lucrative TV business is quickening, and the supposed solution, streaming, has left Disney with billions of dollars in losses,” The Wall Street Journal reported recently. “Iger returned for his second stint as CEO to a changed media business and impatient shareholders. He is under pressure to ensure Disney’s streaming business reaches profitability in the final quarter of its current fiscal year, after racking up more than $11 billion in losses in its first four years.”

 Major Disney stockholder Nelson Peltz is waging a massive proxy fight against Disney for mismanagement and non-accountability. Peltz has help from former Marvel Entertainment chairman Isaac Perlmutter, who played a crucial role in Disney’s rise as a superhero movie producer.

Disney also has been taking a decidedly leftist turn in its approach. In 2022, a group of employees circulated an open letter. 

“The Walt Disney Company has come to be an increasingly uncomfortable place to work for those of us whose political and religious views are not explicitly progressive,” the employees wrote. “We watch quietly as our beliefs come under attack from our own employer, and we frequently see those who share our opinions condemned as villains by our own leadership.”

The employees noted Disney’s “Reimagine Tomorrow” campaign to promote “underrepresented voices.” They said that “the tomorrow being reimagined doesn’t seem to have much room for religious or political conservatives within the company. Left-leaning cast members can promote their agenda and organize on company time using company resources. They call their fellow employees’ bigots’ and pressure TWDC to use corporate influence to further their left-wing legislative goals.”

Even though I receive a monthly pension from Disney, I don’t have a dog in the hunt. But it appears someone has to hold Iger and his compatriots accountable for their actions. 

The Question that Really Matters in Election 2024 wasn’t asked in the ABC Poll

Posted: May 7, 2023 by datechguy in election 2024, elections
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Apparently a new ABC Poll show both Trump and DeSantis leaving Joe Biden by 7 points as of this moment.

While Democrats are in denial about this the GOP should not take too much comfort over it because there is one metric that the poll did not measure as noted in this tweet:

Unless the GOP takes positive action in the courts, in terms of election observers and lawyers and law enforcement to back them up that will be the critical swing group in election 2024.

If You’ve Ever Wondered Why I Never Got a Job in What Some Call “Actual Media”

Posted: November 6, 2019 by datechguy in dablog, elections, media, News/opinion, politics
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…It’s likely because I was willing to write about Jeffrey Epstein while stuff like this was going on.

Amy Robach, ‘Good Morning America’ Co-Host and Breaking News Anchor at ABC, explains how a witness came forward years ago with information pertaining to Epstein, but Disney-owned ABC News refused to air the material for years. Robach vents her anger in a “hot mic” moment with an off-camera producer, explaining that ABC quashed the story in it’s early stages.  “I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts (Now Virginia Guiffre) [alleged Epstein victim]. We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told “Who’s Jeffrey Epstein.  No one knows who that is.  This is a stupid story.”
She continues, “The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.”
Robach goes on to express she believes that Epstein was killed in prison saying, “So do I think he was killed? 100% Yes, I do…He made his whole living blackmailing people… Yup, there were a lot of men in those planes. A lot of men who visited that Island, a lot of powerful men who came into that apartment.”
Robach repeats a prophetic statement purportedly made by Attorney Brad Edwards “…[T]here will come a day when we will realize Jeffrey Epstein was the most prolific pedophile this country has ever known,” and Disgustedly Robach states “I had it all three years ago.”

That’s via James O’Keefe and Project Veritas who had hot mic info that was so explosive that he actually activated a “dead man’s switch” to make sure that this came out in the event of his death.

It was so big that for once the MSM didn’t ignore what he was saying. ABC responded thus:

ABC News executives say their journalists were simply not able to corroborate the details of the reporting sufficiently for broadcast.
“We would never run away from that,” Chris Vlasto, head of investigations for ABC News, tells NPR. The network has filed approximately two dozen digital and broadcast stories on Epstein since early 2015, when ABC started talking to the accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre

For the sake of the few who might actually buy that argument let me remind you of something I wrote in 2014.

If there is one thing the media that loves to play the War on Women® card doesn’t want to touch it’s a story about people using their own private island to get laid that involves Bill Clinton.
What could the media do if this story involving the former father of the year? They would call it old news, not relevant, dirty tricks from a salacious lawsuit that doesn’t even involve him and an attack on Hillary that crosses the line. In fact the left will deploy a plethora of adjectives to discourage further discussion of this story from antiquated to zany, but there is one adjective that could not come out of their mouth to dismiss this story:
Unbelievable
The last few years have proven that the left can convince a low information voter of a lot of things, but even the full power of the mainstream media and the strongest zealots from the War on Women® brigade would not be able to convince the American public that Bill Clinton would have no interest or business on a private island where orgies took place.
That’s why you didn’t see this story in the news last month and why as the case moves forward you’ll not see it covered period.

And a piece I wrote during the 2016 campaign:

as I was watching Jake Tapper on Monday discussing this and the security implication of blackmail for the husband of a top aide of Hillary Clinton my head started spinning.
We are seriously talking about the security implication of Anthony Weiner due to his sexual peccadilloes when we are talking about letting Bill freaking Clinton back into the White House?
I know the MSM is still trying to pretend that this is no big deal but I have two words to say to such people:
Jeffrey Epstein

Along with some video from MSNBC at the time with this key exchange

Video that MSNBC suppressed once the Free Beacon linked to it

Maybe it’s just me but given how often we see stuff at mediaite et al it seems rather unusual for a news network to make a copyright claim over a clip from a news story that used as “fair use” by another news organization. Could this suggest that NBC wants to keep this clip out of the public view because it might hurt Hillary?


I can see the NBC reaction now: Nonsense, we’re not censoring the clip at all. The seven minute clip IS available IF you

  1. Go to the Morning Joe site
  2. Hit search taking you to the MSNBC search engine
  3. Search for Donald Trump
  4. Narrow the field to Morning Joe
  5. Narrow the field to May 16th 2016 and sit through all the videos till you find the right one.
  6. And skip ahead to the 12 minute mark on that video.

If you do so you CAN find the clip

Incidentally the clip does not work from the MSNBC site anymore as but the Free Beason has since found another Youtube account with it that is no longer suppressed as the election is long over and the Epstein Story is now public knowledge.

Apparently they aren’t so worried about their copyright after all.

So when ABC tells you they didn’t have the story, look at the faces around that Morning Joe table who all knew what was being said and then try to make that case.

I suspect writing about this type of thing when everyone wanted it suppressed might have something to do with me not making it bigger in the business but then again if I was bigger and writing about it perhaps it might have lead to a sudden heart attack.