Unsurprisingly, Netflix was lambasted today at a Senate hearing for alleging having “the wokest content in the history of the world” and pushing “propaganda” as the partisan claws came out quickly.
“Netflix has long been a left wing company,’ Senator Ted Cruz bluntly declared Tuesday at an increasingly contentious Capitol Hill hearing on the streamer’s $83 billion acquisition of Warner Bros.
“How are people at home ..feel even remotely confident that if this merger happens, the combined entity would not simply be a propaganda outlet pushing one particular political view with much greater market power than you have now,” the ambitious Texas Senator rhetorically put to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos.
Expressing concern over “censorship in the media and censorship in Hollywood” and “hatred of Donald Trump.” Sen Cruz was far from the only member of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust today to pound the MAGA drum and Sarandos.
“The overwhelming majority of your stuff right now is overwhelmingly woke, and it’s not reflective of what the American people want to see,” declared Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MI) to a visibly uncomfortable Sarandos. “You’re the co-CEO, you were the chief content officer, until recently,” the MAGA Senator added grilling the exec. “Yes or no. Does Netflix stand by its content production decisions?
“Senator Schmidt, we have a great deal of programming on Netflix for all left, right and center,” Sarandos replied. “We have state of the art tools for parents to manage what their kids see on Netflix”
Whipping off MAGA litmus tests like DEI policies and support for diversity, both Sen. Cruz and Sen. Schmitt seemed to be pulling directly from a recent report from Heritage Foundation spinoff the Oversight Project. That document painted Netflix “as holding an outsized role in socially engineering millions of Americans into a predisposition to accept preferred leftwing ideological dogma.”
Handing the 47-page report to the White House and Sen. Lee’s office, Oversight Project boss Mike Howell told Deadline earlier this week that “I don’t want Netflix to get bigger at all. I want it to have less influence.”