Tag: disney

ABC News Laying Off Staff and Completely Cutting Polling Outfit 538

The same media bloodbath that has gutted MSNBC and CNN since the 2024 election is now coming to ABC News.

The network is laying off staff and even completely cut ties to 538, the data and polling outfit created by Nate Silver, who left the network in 2023.

These recent moves came from parent company Disney, which is dealing with its own issues.

The Hill reported:

ABC News eliminating 538 amid layoffs

ABC News Group is eliminating its political arm, 538, which specializes in polling, surveys and data, amid wider layoffs at the Walt Disney parent company, according to information obtained by The Hill.

The layoffs are expected to impact 200 employees which represents under 6 percent of the staff at the company and Disney Entertainment Networks unit. Fifteen employees at 538 will be let go.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the reductions.

The move is a part of broader consolidation efforts that include changes to ABC’s on air programming, sources told The Hill.

The network’s “20/20” and “Nightline” shows are set to be merged into one broadcast segment while the “Good Morning America” production team will be shaved down into management overseen by one person, Simone Swink.

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PLOT TWIST: ABC News Rewards George Stephanopoulos With ‘Multi-Year Contract’ – Days After Trump Inflicted Humiliating Libel Loss

In a surprise move, ABC News has rewarded its anchor George Stephanopoulos with a new contract at the network.

The Los Angeles Times were the first to report that Stephanopoulos, 63, recently agreed to a “new multi-year contract to remain with the ABC News morning program, according to several people familiar with matter who were not authorized to comment publicly.”

No further details were provided about the terms of the contract, such as its length or the size of his pay package.

The Good Morning America host, who rose to political fame as a henchman of former President Bill Clinton, was sued by Donald Trump earlier this year after repeatedly claiming that he was “found liable for rape” by a Manhattan jury.

His statements were a reference to complaints made by a woman named E. Jean Carroll, who has alleged Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s. She has never provided any evidence for her claims.

The deal, which has not been formally announced, will put an end to speculation that Stephanopoulos may be axed by the network after he was the subject of a humiliating libel loss in which its parent company Disney agreed to pay out $15 million and $1 million to cover Trump’s legal fees.

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Gina Carano Scores Legal Victory as Judge Blocks Disney’s Appeal in Free Speech Battle

A California judge has ruled against Disney, denying its request to appeal a July decision that allows Gina Carano’s wrongful termination lawsuit to proceed. Additionally, the request to pause discovery during the appeal was also denied.

Gina Carano took to her social media platform, X, to announce the decision: “After the Judge DENIED Disney’s request to DISMISS my case, Disney requested permission to immediately appeal that decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and delay all discovery while that appeal takes place,” Carano posted. “Yesterday, October 16th, 2024, we learned that the Judge DENIED Disney’s unusual request.”

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

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Disney slammed for selling $10 PBJ sandwich ‘kits’ to stranded guests during Hurricane Milton

Disney has been torn to shreds over a decision to sell peanut butter and jelly sandwich kits for $10 to guests who are stranded during Hurricane Milton.

The theme park closed down ahead of the storm’s arrival this week, but some resort guests found themselves stranded and forced to ride out the hurricane there.

On Wednesday, guests were afforded the opportunity to buy sandwich ‘kits’ for $10.

The kits included a jar of peanut butter, full loaf of bread and strawberry jam.

Initially, people  were impressed with Disney’s generosity, but upon seeing that the multi-billion dollar corporation was charging for the goodie bags, some of the goodwill turned.

‘I was thinking, oh how sweet! Then saw they were charging $10,’ one critic said in response to a TikTok video discussing the promotion.

‘My jaw literally dropped when I saw the $10,’ another added. 

Another noted that Disney ‘is a corporation’ which could ‘literally afford to just give these away.’ 

‘Disney will always make that magic money, honey,’ one said.

‘Considering how pricey the rooms are, I feel they could’ve covered that.’

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About that Secret Service Agents’ free trip to LGBTQ conference at Disneyworld …

We are in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election.  There have already been two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump. 

Reliable sources report Iran has sniper teams here to kill The Donald.  So what does the Secret Service do?  It sends needed agents to an all-expense paid LGBTQ conference at what Disney calls “The Most Magical Place on Earth.”

The Secret Service leadership finally admitted they did not assign the full complement of agents to Trump’s detail in Butler, Pennsylvania.  Only a few were fully trained Protective Detail agents. The rest of the squad came from the B-Team.  They usually spend their time chasing counterfeiters and credit card fraudsters.  The temps’ protection training was watching a two-hour video.  That’s less than a good movie and popcorn. 

The Service doesn’t have enough time or manpower to answer even the simplest questions the Congressional Committee asks. USSS leadership claims they don’t have enough money to complete their vital mission.  But they have the time, resources, and budget to solicit agents for the free four-day trip to what we Floridians call the Mouse House.

The story went public when the service’s DEI office sent a memo to every assistant director asking them to nominate candidates for this fun-in-the-sun trip to Orlando. 

Susan Crabtree of Real Clear Politics uncovered the details. She learned those assistant directors had to send a list of their preferred people to the Secret Service Office of Alternative Employment. 

You may want to stop here and think why the agency responsible for protecting the free world’s leaders needs something called “Alternative Employment,” but that’s up to you.  If I ran the Service, the employment qualifications would include good physical condition, great marksmanship, and a bad attitude, but that’s just me.  I wouldn’t concentrate on hiring agents who nap mano-mano or ladies in comfortable shoes.  

Disneyworld is a very logical place to hold this conference.  Disney’s objection to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bill prohibiting teachers from indoctrinating students about sexual choice in the early school years went national.  Mickey has even supported Gay Days for decades.  For one magical weekend every year, the LGBTQ crowd invades Fantasyland. Participants all wear bright red t-shirts so they can identify kindred spirits.  Disney avoids any problem of straights who arrive in a red shirt feeling accosted.  It offers them free any-color-but red shirts.

Disney can be very ingenious in other ways.  Seminars usually wrap no later than 5:00 p.m,, and there is plenty to do in the evening.  When Gay Days at Disney first began, the manager of the famous Mannequins Night Club called a senior Disney executive at 10:00 p.m.  The manager was very upset.  He asked, ‘Sir, we have men dancing with men!  The families with kids are all very distraught!  What do I do?  What do I do?”

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Disney Shamed into Retracting Phony ‘Steamboat Willie’ Copyright Claim After Film Enters Public Domain

The Disney Grooming Syndicate has been forced to back down from bullying a private citizen who legally used Steamboat Willie in a YouTube video.

YouTuber and voice actor Brock Baker published all eight minutes of Steamboat Willie on his popular YouTube channel (1.1 million subscribers). That alone would normally be considered a copyright violation. On top of that, Brock added his own audio to the classic cartoon that introduced Mickey and Minnie Mouse to the public in 1928.

But.

Steamboat Willie has been in the public domain since the beginning of the year, and Brock published his video a few days after that. Nevertheless, Disney still slapped him with two copyright claims. First, Disney filed a copyright claim on the cartoon itself. The result was that YouTube demonetized the video. After Disney backed off that, the Grooming Syndicate filed a second copyright claim for Steamboat Willie’s soundtrack — which is also in public domain. The whole thing is public domain. Nevertheless, Brock’s video got demonetized — until they earned enough negative media attention to reverse course.

In a way, you can see Disney’s point… The disgraced company is losing billions on its lousy streaming service and theatrical releases, so every dollar does count. But public domain is still public domain, and this bullying campaign is obviously meant to scare off anyone else who would dare do what Disney can no longer do: make money by entertaining the public.

This vile multinational corporation has enjoyed so much special treatment over the years with copyright protection and legislation, and it’s still harassing a private citizen on YouTube who is only guilty of having a few laughs about a cartoon that no longer enjoys copyright protection.

Overall, unless no one files for copyright protection, I’m opposed to the idea of public domain. As evil as Disney is, it is still in business, and its property should be protected for as long as it stands. That’s Good John’s thinking…

Bad John loves seeing Disney lose, fail, and drown in its own greed and perversions.

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Mickey Mouse Is Now In the Public Domain. Well, Sort Of.

The copyright on Mickey Mouse expires today, meaning The Walt Disney Company no longer has the exclusive rights to the character. Does this mean you can put Mickey in your own cartoon? Not exactly.

Under current law, works released between 1924 and 1978 are copyrighted for 95 years. As a result, the thousands of works copyrighted in 1928 enter the public domain today, meaning anyone can use or reprint them without permission. That includes books like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and films like Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus. But the most high-profile addition is Steamboat Willie, the animated short that marked the debuts of both Mickey and his longtime paramour, Minnie.

The cartoon depicted Mickey Mouse working aboard a steamboat, making music, and vexing the boat’s captain, a large cat named Pete. The slapstick humor, anthropomorphized animals, and objects of later Disney works are present, although Mickey is much more mischievous—the antagonistic dynamic with a giant cat is more reminiscent of Tom & Jerry cartoons than the Mickey Mouse familiar to modern audiences.

The seven-minute film was revolutionary: It was the first cartoon to feature synchronized sound—rather than just a silent film with background music—and audiences loved it. Mickey Mouse spawned a franchise that over the following century would earn more than $80 billion and make Disney one of the most powerful media companies on the planet.

Losing out on its rodential cash cow would be a huge blow, and Disney jealously guarded its creation. When Steamboat Willie premiered in November 1928, U.S. law dictated that it would enter the public domain no later than 1984. But two different laws, one passed in 1976 and another in 1998, extended the maximum copyright term, each by twenty years. Each law passed after strenuous lobbying by Disney: The latter statute, the Copyright Term Extension Act, has been derisively referred to as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

Today’s expiration implies that Disney was either unable to secure another extension or unwilling to try. In recent years, Republican lawmakers have signaled their unwillingness to extend copyright law any further on Disney’s behalf. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) even introduced the Copyright Clause Restoration Act of 2022, which would cap copyright terms at a maximum of 56 years—notably, the same term in effect when Walt Disney first released Steamboat Willie.

But this doesn’t mean that Mickey is completely free. The copyright that expires today only applies to Mickey Mouse as he first appeared: rat-like and mischievous, with pupil-less eyes and no gloves. All other interpretations, introduced later—including the magnanimous Mickey who greets visitors to Disney theme parks dressed in a bow tie and tails, with white gloves and human-like eyes and facial features—remain under lock and key.

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DeSantis vs. Disney: Florida’s Fight Over Private Governance

On April 22, 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District, ending perhaps the most successful experiment in private governance in U.S. history. The bill ended an arrangement that turned a swamp on the edges of Orlando into the home of Walt Disney World, one of the busiest tourist destinations on Earth. The governor’s victory is not yet final—while the district was formally dissolved earlier this year, Disney attorneys quickly outfoxed DeSantis, delegating many of the district’s powers back to the company. The company is now suing to reverse the change altogether.

For all the media sound and fury over the duel between the would-be president and the Mouse, experts seem to agree that Disney will retain most of its longstanding autonomy when all the lawsuits are through.

Whatever your views of the “Don’t Say Gay” law that kicked off the DeSantis-Disney feud, or of the increasingly regrettable quality of the live-action Disney feature film reboots of its animated classics, DeSantis’ attempt to dissolve the district is a blatant effort to bully a private company because he disapproved of its constitutionally protected speech. At best, it reveals DeSantis as a culture warrior rather than a small-government conservative. At worst, it exposes DeSantis as a politician willing to toss out the rule of law and free markets to score cheap political points, in the lead-up to a Republican presidential primary in which he’s struggling to meet expectations.

For the most frivolous reasons imaginable, the fate of “the happiest place on Earth” now hangs in the balance.

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Disney+ Cartoon Demands Reparations And More With ‘Slaves Built This Country’ Song

Disney has gone for woke yet again with a recent episode of the cartoon series “Proud Family” — which featured kids singing a song about reparations that America “owes” to black Americans and about how “slaves built this country.”

The recent episode that aired on Disney+, titled “Louder and Prouder,” reviews the history of Juneteenth when the kids discover their town’s founder was a slave-owner. The song opens with the line, “This country was built on slavery — which means slaves built this country” — and that line was repeated over and over throughout.

“We the descendants of slaves in America have earned reparations for their suffering,” the song continued. “And continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in a systemic prejudice, racism and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.”

In the cartoon, that last line was punctuated by four black students glaring while the only white student on the stage with them held a sign that read “still has not atoned for.”

“Slaves built this country,” they shouted again, claiming, “We made your families rich,” as they listed plantation owners, northern bankers, New England ship-owners, the Founding Fathers, and current senators among those who had profited on the backs of slaves.

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Jon Stewart and the Pentagon honor Ukrainian Nazi at Disney World

Defense Department-sponsored “Warrior Games” featured liberal comedian Jon Stewart awarding a member of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion at Disney World. The Pentagon refused to tell The Grayzone whether US taxpayers funded the foreign competitors’ travel.

This August, during the Department of Defense’s annual Warrior Games at Disney World in Orlando, Florida this August 19-28, liberal comedian Jon Stewart awarded a Ukrainian military veteran named Ihor Halushka the “Heart of the Team” award for “inspiring his team” with his “personal example.”

Halushka happens to have been a member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which has been armed by the US and integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard. The award-winning ultra-nationalist wore a sleeve over his left arm as he accepted the prize, presumably to cover up his tattoo of the Nazi Sonnenrad, or Black Sun.

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