Media Bias—This is Journalism?
An actress wins not one, but two Emmys: one for her performance as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series and one as a producer for Outstanding Drama Series. Her exuberant acceptance speech brings down the house.
When you’re a frontline entertainment journalist you would write about the actress’s tremendous achievement—perhaps adding how the series she starred in has changed the face of television and is in fact the first television series broadcast on a streaming platform to win the Television Academy’s Outstanding Drama Series.
But not if you are Seth Abramovitch and you happen to work for an outlet carrying out a vendetta against the actress’s religion. If you are Abramovitch, you look for any hook you can to generate more prejudice. And since there is nothing you can say to tarnish the quality of the actress’s performance or the impact of the series she produces, you devote more than 1,000 words to parsing her post-victory remarks and using them to denigrate her religion.
Then again, we are not dealing with a real journalist in Abramovitch. We are dealing with a wannabe comic writer whose bias and lack of sensitivity have cost him more than one job. Consider his track record:
Abramovitch comes to Los Angeles in 2000 hoping to make it as a comedy writer. He scores a writer’s assistant job on the sitcom Will and Grace.
A “writer’s assistant” mostly sits at a conference table among the show’s writers and records their ideas and jokes. It’s not brain surgery. But Abramovitch is soon fired for missing too many lines.
Was he swiping the jokes? Who knows? It’s a jungle in there, he basically tells 680 News, and off he goes to his next gig—as half of the two-man troll team for the blog “Defamer.” When Gawker Media Group takes over Defamer.com, he’s really in his element.
Or maybe not.
Abramovitch is once again fired, this time for a patently stupid attempt at humor regarding Kanye West’s announcement that he’s forming a think-tank company that will be called DONDA.
But Seth falls yet downward—all the way to The Hollywood Reporter—where he hacks out his hatred for Scientology and its adherents while ignoring the basic rules of journalism.
So Abramovitch blogs, “DONDA will be your everything. Just you wait and see. And what is DONDA? It’s an acronym for Dis Original N***** Dresses Alright.”
Bye-bye, Seth. And by the way, DONDA is the first name of Kanye West’s dear departed mother. That had to be worth at least a cringe—especially the honor of being fired by Gawker, which went out of business after being successfully sued for $140 million for publishing a Hulk Hogan sex tape.
But Seth falls yet downward—all the way to The Hollywood Reporter—where he hacks out his hatred for Scientology and its adherents while ignoring the basic rules of journalism.
Since then he has used his articles and his Twitter account to spread lies and anti-religious bigotry against the Church and its members.
He fits right in at an outlet that has produced more than 300 hate-filled stories on Scientology in the last five years.
If bigotry at The Hollywood Reporter has a familiar ring to it, perhaps it is because the magazine’s founder, Billy Wilkerson, was a major proponent of anti-Communist hysteria of the 1940s and 50s and used his magazine to perpetuate a blacklist that destroyed many lives.
Why wait some 60-70 years before again having to apologize for propagandizing hate and bigotry? STAND is calling on The Hollywood Reporter to excise the anti-religious bigotry that is infecting its ranks and apologize to members of the Church of Scientology.
THR’s actions during this dark period in America so profoundly undermined the fundamental freedoms on which this nation was founded that Wilkerson’s son felt compelled in 2012 to issue a public apology for the actions of his father. The younger Mr. Wilkerson wrote:
The Blacklist silenced the careers of some of the studios’ greatest talent and ruined countless others merely standing on the sidelines….
The U.S. government, which had a great hand in this event, could have prevented it from mushrooming. It did nothing. And no one has ever apologized to the victims of this holocaust. So on the eve of this dark 65th anniversary, I feel an apology is necessary. It's possible, had my father lived long enough, that he would have apologized for creating something that devastated so many careers. On behalf of my family, and particularly my late father, I wish to convey my sincerest apologies and deepest regrets to those who were victimized by this unfortunate incident.
Why wait some 60-70 years before again having to apologize for propagandizing hate and bigotry? STAND is calling on The Hollywood Reporter to excise the anti-religious bigotry that is infecting its ranks and apologize to members of the Church of Scientology.
