Corporate Censorship is Real
But it only matters when it affects something you want to see.
In today’s New York Times, Michelle Goldberg writes about The Chilling Reason You May Never See the New Trump Movie. The film is called The Apprentice and it’s about how Donald Trump learned the art of public life under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, a lawyer and politico who had served a Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and was a Nixonland fixer to put Michael Cohen to shame.
Trump’s relationship with Cohn, and his abandonment of his teacher after the AIDS diagnosis that would kill Cohn in 1986, is well known but hasn’t been dramatized in a relatable way until now. The film was well-received and well reviewed at the Cannes Film Festival but is now struggling to find a distributor in the United States, where it would seemingly be of interest in the months leading up to the presidential election.
Goldberg worries that distributors are being intimidated by Trump’s supporters and not carrying a film they would otherwise put into theaters without much hesitation. She writes: “Should The Apprentice end up widely available globally but not, for political reasons, in the United States, it will be a sign of democratic decay, as well as an augur of greater self-censorship to come. After all, if anxiety about enraging Trump is already shaping what you can and cannot watch, it’s probably bound to get even worse if he actually returns to power.”
The Middlebrow agrees, of course. The Apprentice should find a distributor and it should be available to any American who wants to see it, in a theater or through a streaming service. But it’s interesting that the issue of corporate censorship comes up now. For years, Woody Allen has had difficult finding distribution for his films in the U.S., and The New York Times seemed to care very little. The paper allowed its chief reviewer, AO Scott, to write a screed against Allen and his movies have earned little coverage from The Times ever since. After Amazon broke its distribution and production agreement with the director, his films have had only limited stateside releases. A Rainy Day in New York took years to reach theaters. The recent Coup de Chance, which was also well-reviewed in Europe and played to standing ovations at Cannes, received only a limited U.S. release.
Corporations, even media corporations, don’t really care about “free speech.” They do care about their own speech, of course, especially their commercial speech and their rights to make brand-focused choices. If movie studios cared primarily about the visions of the artists in their employ, every Zach Snyder movie would be two weeks long. More seriously, these studios are more than willing to re-cut their movies to appease censors in China, the same way U.S. technology companies will compromise their encryption or pretend that the Tiananmen Square Massacre didn’t happen.
Because of this, political interests from all sides of U.S. society have put pressure on retailers, music producers and movie theaters and publishers to pre-empt consumer choices by slapping products with absurd warning labels or refusing to sell them altogether. These efforts included the successful lobby by a police union to get Walmart to refuse to sell albums featuring the song Cop Killer by rapper Ice-T to lobbying Amazon not to carry nonfiction books that some groups view as transphobic.
Corporations will always react to this kind of consumer activism by weighing the costs and benefits across various time frames, as well as potential fallout in terms of government regulation, which might include access to other markets and explains why companies often react favorably to government requests even when it’s not required.
About the only way citizens and consumers can influence this process is to resist the temptation to play this game in the first place. If you don’t like a book, don’t buy it. Heck, write a negative review of it. But if your impulse is to write to Amazon to get them to stop selling it then you should stop yourself. If you’re denying other people the right to experiences you don’t like, you’ve probably taken things too far.
In the end, it’s about self control. If you can bring yourself to believe that other people should be able to enjoy speech you can’t stand, you can call yourself a real defender of free expression. Otherwise, you get this mess where you’re at best indifferent to censorship that doesn’t bother you and the indignant when it does.