Free Republic

Let’s begin with two news items. First, in June the Walt Disney Co. will open a new, $5.5 billion theme park in Shanghai, China. China is a great place to make money, but it’s also the land of systematic human-rights abuses, forced abortions, state churches, labor camps, and brutal crackdowns. Disney — undeterred, and with its eyes firmly fixed on the financial prize — actually permits the Chinese government to co-own the park. Meanwhile, back in the United States — the land of political and religious freedom — Disney is threatening to scale back its operations in the state of...

"I assure you, if we felt George was not presenting it fairly or were bias, he would not be on our air," Iger said of George Stephanopoulos. "It's something we take very, very seriously, and we monitor closely." Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger defended ABC News and one of its anchors, former Democratic party advisor George Stephanopoulos, against charges of liberal bias when pressed to do so Thursday by a shareholder who works for a conservative advocacy group. "Are we perfect? No. But I believe the overall presentation of ABC News, the reputation of ABC News, is one that we are...

A film of Walt Disney's first animated creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which has been lost since 1928, has been discovered. [Video at link]

Chinese officials have summoned top American tech executives to Seattle for a forum on Wednesday in a show of force that could make the Obama administration’s standing in Silicon Valley appear weak by comparison. Beijing moved up the date of the annual event to coincide with President Xi Jinping’s U.S. visit and reportedly pressured major Silicon Valley players to send their chief executives to what is normally an annual summit for midlevel management, threatening regulatory scrutiny if they didn’t comply. “It’s not really voluntary,” said Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Jason Healey, a former director of cyber infrastructure protection at the...

Maybe itÂ’s all just a coincidence. Stranger things have happened. Given enough time and enough events, things just happen to align. After all, Walt Disney DIS +2.60%-owned ESPN is the biggest sports outlet, and the NFL is the most popular sport in America. Given enough news and enough stories, could ESPN simply appear to be favoring the NFL with biased stories, peddling misinformation, and making moves to protect the NFL? IÂ’m not the first to whisper these words.ï„¿ï„¿ And, given the amount of money that ESPN pays the NFL to air games, well, every story that favors the NFL as...

Sports-TV powerhouse ESPN, a profit machine that has long towered over the media landscape, is showing signs of stress as the pay-TV industry goes through an unprecedented period of upheaval. A decline in subscribers as customers trim their cable bills, coupled with rising content costs and increased competition, has ESPN in belt-tightening mode, people familiar with the situation say. The company, majority owned by Walt Disney Co., has lost 3.2 million subscribers in a little over a year, according to Nielsen data, as people have “cut the cord” by dropping their cable-TV subscriptions or downgraded to cheaper, slimmed-down TV packages...

They were supposed to be in Mexico that day, not at the opening of some amusement park. But 7-year-old Michael Schwartner persuaded his parents to take a detour. And then his cousin Christine Vess tripped and skinned her knee. And that’s how Michael and Christine became the very first official guests in Disneyland 60 years ago this week and unexpectedly received a lifetime of privileges. That’s how they were escorted past 15,000 people, how they met Walt Disney, and how they posed with Disney for a photograph beamed around the world.

Walt Disney’s Little Known Obsession With Salvador Dali Comes To SF, Reveals Mysterious Side Of Disneyland’s CreatorIt turns out the man behind Mickey Mouse liked quirky cats. Besides his love of wholesome entertainment, Walt Disney also had an appreciation for the eccentric that led to a short-lived partnership and decades-long friendship with surrealistic artist Salvador Dali. Although their styles and personalities were dramatically different, Disney and Dali shared a fascination with the fantastic. They brought their vivid imaginations together shortly after World War II to work on an animated feature called “Destino,” which wasn’t completed until long after their deaths.

The employees who kept the data systems humming in the vast Walt Disney fantasy fief did not suspect trouble when they were suddenly summoned to meetings with their boss. While families rode the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and searched for Nemo on clamobiles in the theme parks, these workers monitored computers in industrial buildings nearby, making sure millions of Walt Disney World ticket sales, store purchases and hotel reservations went through without a hitch. Some were performing so well that they thought they had been called in for bonuses. Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that...

Did you know that that Uncle Walt Disney was a misogynistic Jew-hater?   I didn't either until Meryl Streep informed me and the rest of the world of those purported facts the other day at one of those gatherings where the glitterati touch each other's, er rather, pat each other on the back and spout drivel. Former Reagan speechwriter Clark S. Judge finds such notions fatuous: ...I was dismayed...when...Disney (was called) a "gender bigot" and an anti-Semite....[since] [t]he lead animator in Bambi...was a woman....[and he] had numerous Jewish friends, business associates and employees, supported a number of Jewish charities...

The year is 1961. A wonderful and kind and nice and glorious man named Walt Disney must convince a mean and nasty and crazy woman named P.L. Travers to allow him and his movie studio to do something really nice for his children and your children and everyone’s children. Our hero—call him Walt, everybody does, except P.L. Travers, because she’s mean and nasty and insists on “Mr. Disney”—wants to make a movie out of Travers’s book Mary Poppins, because he promised his kids he would, and a man never backs out on his promise to his kids. P.L. Travers is...

LOS ANGELES – Meryl Streep’s Tuesday speech in which she labeled the late Walt Disney a “gender bigot” is being criticized by some who worked with the Hollywood legend, and others who have a much different take on the Hollywood giant’s life. Walt Disney animator Floyd Norman, who worked alongside the mogul on films including the classic “Sleeping Beauty,” told us Streep is simply misinformed. “I arrived at Disney in 1956 as a young artist. Surprisingly, there were a fair number of young women working in the art department. I too had heard that women were not allowed in animation....

Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson in Saving Mr. Banks If you were browsing news sites yesterday, you may have come across Meryl Streep’s rant about what a racist Nazi anti-semite that Walt Disney was and what an amazing human being Emma Thompson is.It’s easy to take shots at a dead man, but Walt Disney’s character was framed by angry left-wing union members in a town where mildly conservative politics led to cries of “Fascist”.The evidence that Walt Disney ever supported the Third Reich is flimsy and hearsay. There’s far more evidence that his critics supported the USSR.And the evidence for...

Meryl Streep had some choice words to say about Walt Disney during remarks she made Tuesday at an awards gala where she was honoring "Saving Mr. Banks" star Emma Thompson. The "August: Osage County" star called out Disney as both sexist and anti-Semitic while presenting the best actress prize to Thompson at the National Board of Review awards in New York.

No wonder Mary Poppins needed a spoonful of sugar. The forthcoming Saving Mr. Banks is a dark film that tells the heart-breaking true story behind one of the great characters in children’s movie history. P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), the nanny’s formidable creator, is pitted against Walt Disney (Tom Hanks), who promised his daughters that he’d bring Poppins to the big screen. The thing is, that pledge goes against the author’s wishes. Saving Mr. Banks goes behind the scenes of the ferocious battle to make what was to become the famous 1964 musical adaptation. For 20 years, Travers refused to grant...

Philanthropist Diane Disney Miller, who was the daughter of Walt Disney, died Tuesday at her home in Napa, Calif. She had suffered a fall in September from which she never recovered. Disney Miller, the eldest and only biological daughter of Lillian and Walt Disney, helped shepherd the development of Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall ...