They failed following a progressive bias, now they are casting about for a conservative bias. From The Hollywood Reporter:
TV Networks, Studios Shifting Program Strategies in the Trump Age: "Are We Telling the Right Stories?"
In the days following Donald Trump's stunning presidential win, ABC Studios chief Patrick Moran called Black-ish creator Kenya Barris. The men had a project at ABC about a pair of politically divided pundits who fall in love. Suddenly it felt more relevant.
But now Moran wanted to be sure both sides of the spectrum were being presented with equal credibility. "In years past, it would be very easy to let one side feel like the cartoon and have the show assume that the audience is siding with the other," Moran says of the liberal slant that often permeates Hollywood output. Barris agreed and has begun courting right-wing voices for his writers room: "There was no way I wanted to do something that was going to further the divide in this country." On Dec. 6, the project was ordered to pilot.
That exchange came on the heels of what Moran describes as a "wake-up call." Over at ABC, entertainment chief Channing Dungey acknowledges that the rise of Trump and his blue-collar support forced her to question whether her programming was too focused on upper-income brackets. Similar check-ins have taken place across the TV industry as executives try to better understand and appeal to a demographic to which many hadn't paid enough attention. "[The election] made the ground shake underneath media," TLC president Nancy Daniels tells THR, "and now everybody is taking a hard look: Are we telling the right stories? Are we reaching the right people?"
Hey media - we are intelligent and we can form our own opinions. We also have enough sense to know when we are being pandered to and we do not like that. How about you report the facts (and just the facts) and let us form our own opinions. That keeps things very simple on both sides of the fence. If you report the facts, we will continue to subscribe to your offerings. If you fail, we will drop you like a hot potato as you can no longer be trusted.
After all, look at what The New York Times just had to do: New York Times Will Vacate 8 Floors In Its HQ To Generate "Significant Rental Revenue"
Leave a comment