Both Disney CEO Bob Chapek and its previous CEO Bob Iger made the spectacularly unwise choice to make Disney (as far as I can tell) the only major company to interject itself into Florida’s politics over its new parental-rights law, so naturally it’s . . . the head of corporate affairs who got canned.
Geoff Morrell, a former Pentagon spokesman who spent only three weeks as Disney’s head of corporate affairs, was said in a terse Friday-afternoon corporate memo to be “leaving the company to pursue other opportunities.”
Deadline reports: “The hope at the highest level is that Morrell’s removal and the new reorganization will allow the media giant to come out from underneath the falling debris of the current situation.” And who caused that debris to fall? It wasn’t Morrell. It was Chapek and Iger. Chapek preposterously claimed to employees on March 11, “Speaking to you, reading your messages, and meeting with you have helped me better understand how painful our silence was. It is clear that this is not just an issue about a bill in Florida, but instead yet another challenge to basic human rights.” He continued: “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry.” Even more inflammatory was Iger on March 31: “A lot of these issues are not necessarily political. It’s about right and wrong. So, I happen to feel and I tweeted an opinion about the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill in Florida. To me, it wasn’t about politics. It is about what is right and what is wrong, and that just seemed wrong. It seemed potentially harmful to kids.”
Parents were incensed. Both CEOs should have simply shrugged at Florida’s law, which had nothing to do with Disney anyway, but instead they allowed a handful of woke activists at the company to goad them into denouncing the law. Then the company lied about its supposed lobbying against the bill (which did not happen), and all that was accomplished was to make both sides angry. (The activist Left continued to shriek that Disney must “do something,” while conservatives and centrists resented Disney’s interference with parent-driven policies.)
Then Ron DeSantis and the Florida Republicans brought the hammer down on Disney’s special self-government status in central Florida. The Mouse never should have squeaked.