{"id":2731,"date":"2004-08-07T04:21:21","date_gmt":"2004-08-07T18:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2004\/08\/07\/bizarre-homophobic-fox-news-attack-on-disney\/"},"modified":"2019-12-11T07:47:11","modified_gmt":"2019-12-11T15:47:11","slug":"bizarre-homophobic-fox-news-attack-on-disney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2004\/08\/07\/bizarre-homophobic-fox-news-attack-on-disney\/","title":{"rendered":"Bizarre homophobic Fox News attack on Disney"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:10426,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.boingboing.net\\\/2004\\\/08\\\/06\\\/disneys_pc.html&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20070813151015\\\/http:\\\/\\\/www.boingboing.net:80\\\/2004\\\/08\\\/06\\\/disneys_pc.html&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/boingboing.net\\\/&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:10427,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/mediamatters.org\\\/items\\\/200408060012&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/mediamatters.org\\\/items\\\/200408060012&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:10428,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.boingboing.net\\\/2004\\\/08\\\/07\\\/fox_news_attacks_dis.html&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20060105155715\\\/http:\\\/\\\/www.boingboing.net:80\\\/2004\\\/08\\\/07\\\/fox_news_attacks_dis.html&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/boingboing.net\\\/&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/graphics\/2004\/08\/graphics\/disneypc.jpg\" height=\"166\" width=\"156\" alt=\"Disney Dream Desk\" align=\"right\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Earlier this week, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2004\/08\/06\/disneys_pc.html\" title=\"Disney's PC\">Disney announced the &#8220;Disney Dream Desk&#8221;<\/a>, a \\$900 PC for kids. Honestly, it&#8217;s not <em>that<\/em> newsworthy of a deal: the computer is kind of ugly, and one of the selling points is that it comes pre-configured with oodles of site-blocking software to keep kids from looking at porn (and, as a side effect, a good number of in-depth informative resources on the &#8216;net, as Boing Boing points out in the link above).<\/p>\n<p>When Disney president Robert Iger went on Fox News to do a brief promotional spot for the Dream Desk (news or commercial&#8230;who can tell?), he was suddenly blindsided by host <a href=\"http:\/\/mediamatters.org\/items\/200408060012\" title=\"Fox's Your World sub host Varney obsessed with 'Gay Days'\">Stuart Varney&#8217;s homophobic attack on the (<em>not<\/em> Disney-sponsored) &#8220;Gay Days&#8221;<\/a> at Disney World.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  IGER: It&#8217;s easy to set up, easy to use, compact, it doesn&#8217;t take much room, and most importantly it has what&#8217;s called ContentWatch built in.<\/p>\n<p>  VARNEY: Well, you know, I &#8212; exactly. I mean, in June you have &#8220;Gay Days&#8221; at your theme parks. You got any &#8216;Gay Days&#8217; on the Mickey computer?<\/p>\n<p>  IGER: Well, this has built into it all kinds of protective devices that protects the kid, or the child from internet sites that a parent wouldn&#8217;t deem appropriate. Also, the fact &#8212;<\/p>\n<p>  VARNEY: Well, you don&#8217;t protect the kids from &#8220;Gay Days&#8221; at the theme parks, do you? Why do you have to protect them in the computer?<\/p>\n<p>  IGER: No, we don&#8217;t sponsor &#8212; we don&#8217;t sponsor &#8220;Gay Days.&#8221; You know, we are a company that lets anyone who is willing to pay through our gates.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Kudos to Iger for handling the sudden, unexpected (and entirely unreasonable and unprofessional) line of questioning as best as he could, that&#8217;s for sure.<\/p>\n<p>Varney should, at minimum, be censured by Fox for derailing a promotional fluff piece with his bigoted hysteria. This was an absolutely ridiculous injection of far-right-wing hatred into a situation where it was far, far out of place, and really shouldn&#8217;t be tolerated, even by &#8220;fair and balanced&#8221; Fox News.<\/p>\n<p>(via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2004\/08\/07\/fox_news_attacks_dis.html\" title=\"Fox News attacks Disney for insufficient homophobia\">Boing Boing<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p><strong>iTunes:<\/strong> &#8220;Heaven Says Move (Heavenly Bliss)&#8221; by DJ H. Geek from the album <em>Heaven Says Move<\/em> (1999, 5:46).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Disney president Robert Iger went on Fox News to do a brief promotional spot for the Dream Desk (news or commercial&hellip;who can tell?), he was suddenly blindsided by host Stuart Varney&#8217;s homophobic attack on the (not Disney-sponsored) &#8216;Gay Days&#8217; at Disney World.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2042],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}