A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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Anybody with eyeballs and a few screens will have noticed the prevalence of LGBT characters and storylines. The Academy Awards celebrates such films with fervent enthusiasm; kids’ outlets from Disney and Nickelodeon fall all over themselves to integrate LGBT content; LGBT groups exercise enormous influence over the film industry. But that, of course, is not enough. From The Daily Wire:
Leaders of the LGBTQ+ Writers Committee of the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) have called on Hollywood to “dig deeper and do better” in terms of representation.
“It is present-day Hollywood’s responsibility to make right all the harm caused by Hollywood’s past,” the leaders said in an open letter. According to the letter, WGAW survey last month said up to 25% of people who identify as LGBTQ claim “they have hidden their identity — or felt compelled to do so — in an industry environment.”
There’s growing evidence that Nickelodeon’s hard push to promote the LGBTQ agenda to children is having a negative impact on the network’s ratings.
In the last two weeks, both Nickelodeon and its preschool-targeted network, Nick Jr., have released videos championing “trans,” “queer,” and “pansexual” inclusion. One video that sparked mass outrage depicted a cartoon version of drag queen Nina West singing about various LGBTQIA groups “[loving] each other so proudly” on “Blues Clues and You,” a show for two- to five-year olds. That same video showed a female-to-male transgender beaver who appeared to have post-operative surgical scars on its chest…
Pirates and Princesses, a popular entertainment site specializing in Disney-related news, reports Nickelodeon YouTube videos were “downvoted to such a degree that they’ve now hidden the ratio.” The site also says the network has seen a major decline in viewers since it began overtly pushing the LGBTQ agenda to its young viewers:
Since July of 2017, Nickelodeon’s viewership has dropped from 1.3 million average viewers per week to a June of 2021 average of only 372,000. In only four years, Nickelodeon has dropped more than two thirds of its audience. That is catastrophically bad for the cable channel, but with cable on the way out, maybe it’s not so bad? The catch here is that it is, in fact, that bad and perhaps worse, simply because Nickelodeon seems to be the primary driving force behind new subscribers to Paramount+.
There are signs that Viacom has not learned any lessons and is retrofitting these old shows with the same principles that have resulted in Nickelodeon’s huge loss in ratings. Even with a show about infants, much of the headlines have been about a retconned, now-lesbian character; whatever your thoughts on that issue, it’s hard to see how a children’s show about infants is best served in advertising when the news is all about sexuality.
This won’t change anything, mind you. Capitalism with a conscience in 2021 means being on “The Right Side of History”—and that’s the side with post-op transgender beavers and drag queens singing to kids.
