After the Boycott, Disney Courted the Right Wing
Sat Sep 09, 2006 at 03:50:49 PM PDT
We are planning to boycott Disney and its products. Does anyone remember the right wing boycott of Disney which went on for 9 years? The right was upset by Disney's cultural products, including the Miramax films, and the company's tolerance toward gays. All of which caused the American Family Association (AFA) and the Southern Baptists to shun the company in a high-profile campaign.
But in 2005, these boycotts ended, amid signs that Disney had been effectively alerted to its need to embrace the Christian community with open arms.
More below.
The AFA ended its boycott last year and noted the capitulation of Disney to more Christian-oriented programming:
Finally, the news that Disney was co-producing a film based on the Christian literary classic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, has brought cautious approval from some evangelicals. The film, co-produced with Walden Media, will be released in theaters December 9. According to an article by the Orlando Sentinel's Mark Pinsky, Disney has mounted a 10-month marketing campaign to reach the Christian community with news of the film. Toward that end, Disney has hired two Christian marketing companies, Motive Marketing and Grace Hill Media.
http://www.afa.net/...
And AFA's proud summary of the effect of its boycott:
One of the positive things to come out of the boycott, Wildmon insisted, was that Disney seemed to become more cognizant of how it had hurt its family-friendly image among many Christians.
The Southern Baptists had issued this command in 1997:
"BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED, That the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Dallas, Texas, June 17-19, 1997, urge every Southern Baptist to take the stewardship of their time, money, and resources so seriously that they refrain from patronizing The Disney Company and any of its related entities, understanding that this is not an attempt to bring The Disney Company down, but to bring Southern Baptists up to the moral standard of God."
http://kevinrossen.com/...
Southern Baptists voted last year to end their Disney boycott:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
The Southern Baptist Convention, which kick-started a widespread conservative religious boycott of Walt Disney Co. eight years ago, voted Wednesday to end the action but warned Disney that it was keeping its eye on the company.
It's not clear that Disney was actually deprived of revenue during the years of the boycott - http://kevinrossen.com/...
However, Disney did seem to absorb a message from the Christian right that it was not paying proper attention to them, and the boycott may have succeeded in jumpstarting a rightward turn at Disney, which is all too apparent in the 9/11 film fiasco.
And a lesson for us is that a cultural boycott - even with minimal financial success - that effectively paints the company as a captive of either left or right succeeds in tarnishing the Disney image. In our case, however, I predict that we can very effectively deprive Disney of audience, patrons and consumers, and seriously affect its bottom line.
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