LA Times barred from Disney movies after report on corporate welfare

The Washington Post also has a single owner, Jeff Bezos.

I would suggest that Disney is even more famous than Barbra Streisand.

That would muddy the waters. A review of any sort of something they haven't seen due to Disney's behavior would be unnecessarily vindictive. It would also far more negatively impact the people involved in the movie (outside corporate Disney) than necessary.

Point out why there isn't a review the opening day, with a reference to the original article and Disney's dispute. And then post a real review (or don't bother reviewing at all) once they can see it. That is far more responsible and professional.

That's the equivalent of people leaving 1-star Amazon reviews of an item they never received. It's juvenile and doesn't help anybody.

The proper response would be to go after Disney even harder. Go after the politicians they puppet. Be as much of a nuisance as they can be until concessions are made.

This is a funny joke, but empirically not true as of this last election. Hillary massively out spent Trump.

There's a variant of this that's been studied: quadratic voting, but more in the context of corporate governance. It actually can have positive effects.

http://ericposner.com/quadratic-voting/

But then what would the media have to talk about?

Non-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didius_Julianus

Ha, I specifically remember this as one of my favorite episodes from the History of Rome Podcast[0] by Michael Duncan (#98 in linked list[1]).

Of some relevance is his new book that just came out, The Storm Before the Storm[2], which details the events that preceded the rise of Julius Caesar and paved the way for him to overthrow the republic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/32lono/every_e...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Storm-Before-Beginning-Roman-Republic...

$2B in free media attention helped a bit, I'd imagine. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...

Does that count the amount of free press Trump received during the campaign?

I risk to devolve this into a flame war, but I think it would be a good idea to wait what Muellers investigation finds with regard to influences on the presidential election, so money spend by third parties to help get someone elected can be attributed to the corresponding campaign.

It worked for Scott Walker in the Wisconsin recall. He outspent his opponent 10:1 to win only by a couple points.

$408M USD, but how many rubles?

> But even that doesn't work. In 2016 for the US presidency, Hillary Clinton's campaign had $790M USD versus Donald Trump's $408M USD. She had double the money 'to buy the presidency' and she still lost.

In addition, we can look at state-level races to get more data on the effect of campaign spending. It turns out that, after a certain point[0], campaign spending does not correlate very well with campaign success, and in self-funded candidates in particular actually tend to underperform: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sometimes-money-cant-bu...

[0] ie, obviously your gubernatorial campaign won't get very far if you only have $1000, total. But the difference between $40MM (what Brown spent in his 2010 campaign for governor) and $200MM (what Meg Whitman spent in that same race) is a lot less than people think.

Versus Donald Trump's reported $408m. How much came from Putin et al?

This implies that the moral cost of corruption (knowing you are responsible for banrupting the city you represent for example) means absolutely nothing to the elected official.

Implying people go out of their way to read Disney movie reviews. People who go see these movies are probably parents with children. Your average 5-yo doesn't make the decision whether or not to see "German fairy tales 5: Snow white harder" based on the review in Hollywood Tribune.

"better" doesn't seem a good description for the gaming community's connection to studios. In many cases, gamers themselves might even strong-arm media outlets for studios with or without permission, hence the inflated scores. The recent fake review on Mario Odyssey comes to mind.

That's not necessarily true, lots of gamers are just casual gamers who will only buy the blockbusters, just as with movies, and will probably not go beyond checking the metacritic score before buying, or even worse they will preorder it before the reviews are even out.

I think the main difference is that AAA games are much more expensive than a movie ticket, so the percentage of people who do this is lower.

This behavior has near zero repercussions for gaming studios. Despite companies like Ubisoft blacklisting and badmouthing critics who gave honest opinions of arguably poor game design choices, these companies have never been richer

They openly talked about it when CBSi (also owners of Gamespot) bought Giant Bomb back in... 2012? I forget what year, but it was pretty open about his Kane and Lynch review got him fired.

How so? Until I got to college my second job (after "sandwich artist" at Wendy's) was as a paid contributor to one of the two powerhouse gaming blogs at the time (the one that wasn't Kotaku; if you were in the scene back then, you'd heard of us), back when blogging was first coming to the public consciousness and the term "blogosphere" had yet to be coined. And while in retrospect I'd classify the quality of my own writing as "tabloid amateur" at best (please, God, don't go look at it!), we held ourselves to quite high standards of integrity: we could not accept any gifts from publishers, including paying for our own lodging and airfare when traveling to events; if we attended after-parties (at E3 and such), we had to disclose our presence and acknowledge any conflicts of interest; and when receiving games to review not only did we have to disclose as such, but we were forbidden from keeping any games, so we held raffles in order to award the games to our readers (back when physical copies were the norm, remember). If even our flying-by-the-seat-of-our-pants blog could adhere to standards, why is everyone so dim on the prospect of integrity for game journalists?

Isn't violating embargo different? I thought most reviewers agree to that explicitly.

Well said.

On a related note on of my most memorable classes in college was Philosophy of Business Ethics. One of the many takeaways I had was that business do not make decisions. People (agents) in the business make the decisions. Disney did that, Disney decided this, what's best for Disney is, etc. But in reality people are making these decisions, not some nebulous company concept. Same concept as you are pointing out.

I wonder if the child sex abuse problem in hollywood will ever be blown wide open like this current scandal was. I imagine it is comparably widespread and it's a /much/ greater threat to the reputations of those involved, so really any measures to keep it covered up would seem justifiable those on the inside.

My assumption is that he upset some other powerful people who then allowed this to happen. Reminds me of a line from Rules for Rulers by CGP Grey:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

It's not the people's revolt that overthrows the king, it's the court who are overthrowing the king by allowing the people's revolt to progress... because the king has stopped providing them with enough treasure to keep him propped up.

My guess is that something changed the political calculus for his key supporters and they either precipitated this or allowed it to happen.

For sure there are other abusers who are probably showering their allies in treasure to keep them loyal so they don't get caught up in this.

At a lower level, this is the game everyone who participates in "access journalism" is playing. Journalists and publications build relationships with sources and report stories keeping one eye on the writing/impact/truthfulness and another on the long term relationship with the sources.

That's the implied norm of institution (business/government) relationships with the media - we maintain relationships, you write about us and some stories will be critique us so we'll soft cut your access off for a little bit but not explicitly and then we'll let you in again.

An example would the one you yourself made. Journalists join the White House press corps, and over time get access to various West Wing staffers to write stores.

(if you're wondering whether this mechanism contributes to status quo bias and protection of established interests you're headed in the right direction :) )

Access journalism is distinct from investigative journalism which is what we're seeing here. Investigative journalism assumes journalistic independence and a more adversarial relationship with the institution being documented. What we hope to see after an expose like this is the institution coming to terms with its behavior and in response to public outcry, tempering the things that were revealed.

The problem of course is that institutional power in the United States, especially that of large corporations, is so large that they respond to this kind of journalism with aggression.

I don't know whether Disney will suffer for making that choice, but I hope that they do.

Right but there's a bigger problem and that is that law making is detached from law making.

Unlikely to work, if it were to happen.

Addings more laws tends to help the people who can afford lawyers.

You could look at simplifications instead, eg change the voting system from first-past-the-post to something like range voting, and candidate behaviour (and thus reacting to incentives) would completely change.

I'm a billionaire. I buy a couple local news companies and tell them to run what ever content I want. How do you stop this without limiting free speech of the individual as well?

> Pass a Constitutional amendment that states that corporations are not people.

No one claims they're people. The law lets them stand in as people so society can function. The whole "corporations aren't people" meme is myopically fixated on campaign finance, ignoring the much larger issues around this legal doctrine.

Can a corporation own property?

Can it own patents? Copyrights? Trademarks?

Can it be sued in court?

Can it file lawsuits itself?

Can it make contracts?

I don't think any of us would like the result of answering "no" to all those questions, yet those are the questions that the legal fiction of corporate personhood was invented to answer.

Should corporations have the same free speech rights as people? I can see an argument for answering that "no", as rich corporations may speak disproportionately powerfully. I can also see an argument for answering it "yes", in the sense that corporations are just people acting together, and collective speech should be just as protected as individual speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

Remember that whatever constraints you put on EvilCorp's speech are going to apply just as well to the Sierra Club, a labor union, or the NAACP. I honestly don't know if that's a tradeoff work making. Maybe it is.

I agree with your point about transparency.

Are you serious? Wow

I paid him like $10, totally worth it.

I don't agree with the parent either, but this growing trend of accusing everyone you disagree with on the internet of being a paid shill is just getting absurd.

Yes I did, bad assumption

If you live in that town and work for Disney you probably think it's working just fine.