For Disney’s Iger, an Unlikely Political Turn
Speaking on the stage of the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, he defended the decision to refrain from disciplining Ms. Hill by saying,
“I felt we needed to take into account what other people at ESPN were feeling at this time, and that resulted in not taking action.”
On gun control, after the Las Vegas massacre — in which one Disney employee was shot dead
and another was shot in the lung — Mr. Iger said, “In this day and age, we get outraged when an athlete doesn’t stand for the national anthem — where’s the outrage here?”
Then there was the presidential question, which his inquisitor, the Vanity Fair writer
Nick Bilton, posed while noting that he had been asked to avoid the subject.
Before his attacks on ESPN and the late-night crew, Mr. Trump singled out ABC News anchors for nasty criticism, calling its chief anchor George Stephanopoulos “Little George”
and telling the ABC News weekend anchor Tom Llamas, “You’re a sleaze.”
So it made for fascinating viewing when Mr. Iger showed up in Beverly Hills last week to sit for a question
and answer session at Vanity Fair’s annual New Establishment Summit, a two-day schmoozefest for the machers of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
In September, he called the president’s decision to rescind the Obama-era program allowing the children of undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States — officially called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — “cruel and misguided.” (Adding to the sense
that Mr. Iger has politics on the brain, records show he switched his party registration from Democrat to no party preference last year.)
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Before the Trump presidency, who could have imagined
that the Walt Disney Company would find itself at the fiery center of the American political debate?