The Tinkerbell in the Coal Mine

Several years ago, when there were outstanding questions about companies' legal ability to share with their users government security access requests, Apple put up a statement on its website. The statement just plainly said that Apple had not had any governmental requests for user information. Everyone knew that was the canary in the coal mine for Apple. If that statement disappeared from their website, it signaled that the government had come snooping.

Once the law got clarified, tech companies could be open about security requests. Apple’s statement did go away, signaling a request. But with clarity in the law, Apple could be open about what was happening and did not need to just make statements disappear.

I wonder if ABC News and other news networks need something like this. How long, for example, can CNN keep reporting the depth of China’s ethnic cleansing before China decides Warner Brothers, the parent company of CNN, cannot have access to China’s box office if CNN keeps up?

ABC News, like ESPN, is owned by Disney. ESPN now famously started cutting cameras if people in the stands at NBA games held up signs in support of Hong Kong. Can ABC News fairly and accurately report on what Disney did in China or on what China is doing?

The issue is being raised because we now know Disney filmed “Mulan” in parts of China where the Chinese are operating concentration camps and engaging in the ethnic cleansing of minority muslim populations. Though reported only in the opinion section and not the news section of the Washington Post, consider this report.

Disney filmed “Mulan” in regions across China (among other locations). In the credits, Disney offers a special thanks to more than a dozen Chinese institutions that helped with the film. These include four Chinese Communist Party propaganda departments in the region of Xinjiang as well as the Public Security Bureau of the city of Turpan in the same region — organizations that are facilitating crimes against humanity. It’s sufficiently astonishing that it bears repeating: Disney has thanked four propaganda departments and a public security bureau in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China that is the site of one of the world’s worst human rights abuses happening today.

More than a million Muslims in Xinjiang, mostly of the Uighur minority, have been imprisoned in concentration camps. Some have been released. Countless numbers have died. Forced sterilization campaigns have caused the birth rate in Xinjiang to plummet roughly 24 percent in 2019 — and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” fits within the legally recognized definition of genocide. Disney, in other words, worked with regions where genocide is occurring, and thanked government departments that are helping to carry it out.

(Emphasis added)

Disney did not have to film in those regions or even in that country. There is no substantial connection between those regions and the plot of the movie. Instead, Disney chose to film in those regions despite the genocide.

This is akin to Disney filming around Auschwitz prior to the United States’ involvement in World War II and thanking Leni Riefenstahl and Joseph Goebbels and the Office of Public Enlightenment. We weren’t at war at the time, so please ignore the bodies.

The United States has a real problem on its hands with Hollywood studios increasingly catering to the Chinese box office.

• CNN is owned by Warner, which owns Warner Brothers.

• NBC/MSNBC is owned by Comcast, which owns Universal.

• ABC News is owned by Disney, which owns Walt Disney Pictures.

• CBS News is owned by CBS/Viacom, which owns Paramount.

Ironically, the only news network that is not owned by a company tied to a film studio is Fox News, because Fox sold 20th Century Fox to Disney. It is the only network that has no reason to fear Chinese punishment for accurate reporting on China’s ethnic cleansing. Even the New York Times has benefited from Chinese communist propaganda revenue with its publication of China Daily advertising.

There are great reporters at the various American news outlets. They need to come to terms with their parent companies’ dependence on Chnese revenue. Even Apple is starting to figure out it better up manufacturing in India, Taiwan, Brazil, and elsewhere as Chinese influence continues to grow. These newsrooms need to figure out how they will be able to exert editorial independence when China starts punishing their parent companies’ bottom lines.

What is really remarkable is how these companies are willing to be woke in America while turning a blind eye to China’s human rights abuses. In 2019, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced Disney would stop making movies in Georgia if the state’s fetal heartbeat legislation were upheld in court. Meanwhile, Iger is perfectly willing to film movies between concentration camps in China and suck up to Chinese communists.

This is a real problem for both Hollywood and America’s news industry, which is polling worse with the public on truthfulness than even President Trump.

We need some established canaries or Tinkerbells in the newsroom coal mines so we know when the newsrooms think their parent companies have sold out. But, in the case of ABC, it may be too late.