While stolen information from the Sony hack continues to fill editorial holes around the country, the theft of a reported 100 terabytes of information by criminals apparently working for the dictator Kim Jong-Un has raised two very important questions.
First, is there a stooge angle in all this? The Three Stooges shorts were all produced by Columbia Pictures, which is now owned by Sony. Film libraries are scattered and chopped up in ways that generally make studio identities meaningless, but Sony in 2012 brought out Three Stooges: The Ultimate Collection, so they presumably still own the canon. If America’s stooge supply is at risk, the words “act of war” no longer seem so abstract.
Second, I noted the other day that the establishment media are filling their bellies with what is essentially stolen property. There are no laws preventing The New York Times or The Washington Post from trafficking in this material, and the only duty of journalism is to publish news that is accurate and interesting. The problem is that these publications all believe journalism has other solemn duties — notably to police yellow journalism, act as a gatekeeper against sleazy news practices, and generally decide what is and is not Fit To Print. By that standard I don’t see how the destination media are passing their own test in this case. I cited several examples of sanctimony in my article last week, but my friend Sean Malone pinpoints a more recent example and highlights a type of hypocrisy I may not have fully articulated:
A couple months ago the private data – in the form of nude photos – of several famous people was hacked and released publicly. When that happened, all the same publications that are gleefully sharing every email and statement they can dig up that is of any marginal interest from Sony, were busy claiming that by even so much as *looking* at the nude photos, people were as bad as the hackers themselves and the moral equivalent of rapists in some cases.
Now . . . As with anything digital, once it’s out there, it’s out there. Interested parties can access the Sony data, or Jennifer Lawrence’s nudes, or X-Men Origins: Wolverine within a few keys and clicks.
But can you imagine the outrage if major news outlets had posted the nudes, or say, Kim Kardashian’s full sex tape in dozens of articles for two weeks straight on their front pages? No? Well . . . That’s exactly what we’re seeing at The Hollywood Reporter and the NY Times with the Sony hack.
The material selected for heavy coverage in the Sony hack includes plenty of interesting business and entertainment stories. Conveniently, much of it — such as the news that Jennifer Lawrence got slightly lower participation points than her male co-stars in American Hustle — fits into pre-existing narratives that are of great interest to the mainstream media. Some of it even fits narratives of interest to me: Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin’s jocular speculation about President Obama’s only being interested in black movies seems like a strange case of people getting in trouble for privately expressing attitudes they hold quite openly in public. Executives in liberal Hollywood talk freely about their reluctance to hire black stars out of concern for unspecified overseas audiences and foreign backers. Ridley Scott said more or less exactly that in a recent interview about the casting on Exodus: Gods and Kings — which is shaping up to be a considerable bomb despite its white cast. (That attitude even shows up in the movie that provoked Kim Jong-Un’s wrath, The Interview, a picture that is obviously based on Dennis Rodman’s high jinx in the Hermit Kingdom yet stars those two soul brothers Seth Rogen and James Franco.) Other stolen Sony property has been catnip to reporters on the hunt for evidence of gender pay disparities, ill-treatment of below-the-line workers by gilded executives, and so on.
But the free-for-all over this ill-gotten loot reveals an interesting mindset: that business information is somehow less privileged than other types of information, and in particular that the business of entertainment doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as a business. Over the weekend I saw plenty of low-level Hollywood types gleefully passing on information showing how rotten the Sony fatcats are, even thanking the Kim dynasty for making it all public. Once again, Team America: World Police has proved prescient: When push comes to shove, Hollywood liberals will even line up with North Korea.