Small World After All, Eh, Disney Co.?

Things were a lot simpler when the Walt Disney name was equated with Bambi, Davy Crockett and the Happiest Place on Earth. Not any more.

Though it still dominates the animation business--with “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life”--the Walt Disney Co. is now a media conglomerate, the owner of ABC and the maker of adult-oriented films as well as children’s fare. Coming a long way from conservative roots planted by Walt Disney himself, the company now has earned its pedigree as a blue-ribbon member of the elite Hollywood left.

Look no further than the Disney studio’s latest contribution to political correctness and liberal orthodoxy by way of the film “The Insider.” In “coming attraction” promotional trailers and current television commercials, Al Pacino is seen shouting hysterically into a telephone--presaging the melodrama of this soon-to-be-released movie and signaling there’s plenty of emotional oomph to come.

About what? Well, about one of the political left’s favorite wedge issues--the venality, ugliness and dark mendacity of the tobacco industry, of course. Times reporter Claudia Eller describes “The Insider” as a chronicle of “the real-life relationship between reluctant whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) and ’60 Minutes’ producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), who convinces the former Brown & Williamson scientist to expose Big Tobacco’s knowledge of nicotine addiction on network TV.”

The Disney Co. and the director, Michael Mann, are spinning the movie as fraught with risk, claiming the subject matter makes this a gamble for Disney. Pardon the indelicacy, but the word “hogwash” comes to mind.

Hollywood takes no creative risks whatsoever in producing such movies. Among that close-knit and knee-jerk community of lunch-doers, nothing is more popular than bashing corporations and portraying them as hideous gargoyles of social indifference. Moreover, given the Clinton administration’s nonstop drumbeat to demonize the tobacco industry (whose federal subsidies he regularly signs into law) and the high-profile attacks by greedy trial lawyers, where is the risk?

Indeed, Eller touts “The Insider” as a likely Oscar contender. That means these faux Davids versus their caricatured Goliaths will be able to play to the crowd at the Academy Awards ceremony, preening with self-righteous speeches about the courage shown in making such an “artistic statement.”

But given the Disney studio’s penchant for whistle-blowers and exposing social repulsiveness, it should not overlook the opportunity in its own barnyard. Coincidentally, on the same day the paean to Disney’s braveheartedness was written, The Times also reported that a Disney-owned radio station in Los Angeles--KLOS-FM--is under fire for last year’s promotion distributing “Black Hoes” (black, plastic gardening tools) to its audience.

But this hoe just scratched the surface because the controversy further “uncovered 11 years of complaints about barbs against Jews, Asians and blacks” aired on one of its radio shows. Demands by African American organizations to dismiss the offending radio hosts have been met with a company stonewall.

Furthermore, this Disney-owned radio station clearly has its own whistle-blowers. The brouhaha was ignited by two black station employees in a lawsuit which--in addition to charges of racial offensiveness--accuses the station management of violating and manipulating FCC regulations, making improper demands on employees to alter station logs and reaping benefits for personal financial interests.

The lawsuit comes on the heels of long-standing objections by the Anti-Defamation League that the station has aired the terms “Yid,” “Japs,” and “Sambo” as well as sketches such as “NYPD Jew.”

One wonders if the movie-makers and defenders of human morality will now put some Disney greenbacks into exploring this corporate-sponsored hatemongering--and whether its own whistle-blowers will be lionized instead of stigmatized. One wonders, indeed, if Al Pacino, on Oscar night, will acknowledge his association with a company whose agents have spewed unwashed verbal bigotry onto the airwaves of Southern California.

Disney is now in a full public relations mode regarding this garbage which provides corporate profits, and recent reports indicate there are attempts to settle the lawsuit. Its effort to distance itself from allegations of pandemic malfeasance shows that--by way of its movie ‘The Insider”--one method of distraction is to run with the hounds instead of the hare.

But the other critter that comes to mind in this sordid hypocrisy is one with which there is great familiarity: M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.