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Go woke, go broke: Disney announces layoffs, hiring freeze because it’s ‘just what leadership requires’

November 13, 2022 | | Print Article

As Elon Musk fights off critics and lawsuits amid massive workforce cuts, Disney has announced it, too, will be laying off employees, implementing a targeted hiring freeze, and cutting back on company travel.

The news, delivered in the form of a Friday memo from Disney CEO Bob Chapek to his top executives, follows dismal quarterly earnings results and tanking stock prices.

“I am fully aware this will be a difficult process for many of you and your teams,” Chapek wrote, according to Variety. “We are going to have to make tough and uncomfortable decisions.”

“But that is just what leadership requires,” he continued, “and I thank you in advance for stepping up during this important time. Our company has weathered many challenges during our 100-year history, and I have no doubt we will achieve our goals and create a more nimble company better suited to the environment of tomorrow.”

The media giant has formed a “cost structure taskforce” which will be conducting a “rigorous review of the company’s content and marketing spending,” Chapek wrote.

The taskforce amounts to three people: Chapek, CFO Christina McCarthy, and general counsel Horacio Gutierrez.

As American Wire previously reported, while the nation was glued to the midterm election results, on Tuesday night and into early Wednesday morning, Disney’s stocks tumbled more than 13 percent, to just below $87 a share, the lowest price since 2014.

 

Fourth-quarter results revealed Disney’s streaming services, including Disney+ and Hulu, lost a staggering $1.5 billion.

According to Breitbart Senior Writer John Nolte, it’s a direct effect of Disney’s abandonment of “safe and wholesome entertainment for children.” Instead, he contends, it has “become a company dedicated to child abuse and grooming.”

In other words, Disney went woke, and now it’s going broke.

In his memo, Chapek wrote that the cost-cutting measures will help him and McCarthy “achieve the important goal of reaching profitability for Disney+ in fiscal 2024 and make us a more efficient and nimble company overall.”

“This work is occurring against a backdrop of economic uncertainty that all companies and our industry are contending with,” he explained. “While certain macroeconomic factors are out of our control, meeting these goals requires all of us to continue doing our part to manage the things we can control—most notably, our costs.”

With respect to content and marketing, Chapek said, “[W]e have undertaken a rigorous review of the company’s content and marketing spending working with our content leaders and their teams.”

“While we will not sacrifice quality or the strength of our unrivaled synergy machine,” he continued, “we must ensure our investments are both efficient and come with tangible benefits to both audiences and the company.”

It is the company’s content that has likely landed it in the position it now finds itself.

As Nolte noted, Disney killed “its golden geese” with “the ruination of Star Wars and the slow-motion collapse of Marvel.”

A same-sex kiss got Buzz Lightyear banned in the Middle East, and a leaked clip from a Disney+ cartoon series called “Baymax!” featured a transgender man in a rainbow t-shirt shopping for menstrual pads “with wings.”

“Today,” Nolte wrote, “Disney is like an innocent-looking ice cream truck driven by a child predator.”

Melissa Fine
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