News Media Quiet As A Mouse Regarding Catholic Angles In Disney-DeSantis Dispute
(ANALYSIS) I was never nuts for Disney. I’ve never been to one of their theme parks, either as a child or now as a parent of two children, and never indulged in their movies much over my lifetime. I’ll freely admit that puts me in the minority, both in the United States and around the world, when it comes to Disney consumption.
I was, however, once a Disney employee. No, I didn’t work in one of their stores. Instead, I was employed at ABC News in New York, where I worked for the digital unit running the website and other internet assets such as social media. It was a great place to work — although not “the happiest place on Earth” as the official tagline for Disneyland states. It was, after all, a newsroom — but one of the perks was free tickets each year to Disney amusement parks.
I say all this in the context of the ongoing feud regarding the Florida “Parental Rights in Education” bill, which is now law after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it. This is the much-discussed bill that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
The law continues to get media coverage for two reasons: first, Disney’s involvement, and second, the larger notion that DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, is — everyone chant the media mantra — “engaging in a culture war.” This remains a political story, a business story and a pop culture story.
Is this also an important religion story? It certainly is — Terry Mattingly takes on this very topic in GetReligion’s most recent podcast.
My most recent GetReligion post focused on the news media largely ignoring the Republican DeSantis’ Roman Catholic faith in regard to the widespread news coverage around the bill, which opponents effectively labeled “Don’t Say Gay” — even though the bill never used those words.
At the same time, the news coverage for conservative press around the legislation has centered much more on Disney’s late-in-the-game activism in opposing it. The coverage among mainstream and progressive news sites continues to center on that activist “Don’t Say Gay” mantra.
This is also something fueled by Twitter, despite voices trying to argue the opposite. This spills over into journalism, where the premise of stories is often wrong. At the very least, it avoids giving “the other side” a voice in the story because it could negate the narrative.
This public fight takes place in an age of misinformation and increased distrust of news media in the wake of the Hunter Biden laptop story and Russiagate. The treatment of those stories by mainstream newspapers and TV networks has led to a sobering reckoning in recent months.
As for the new Florida law, Disney has vowed to work to undo the measure, but a Washington Post review of lobbying disclosures found no record of Disney activity on the bill in the House, where the legislation first emerged this past January.
What the coverage has been missing is that neutral approach to both sides that this important subject warrants. Without it, we are getting lots of misinformation and buzzwords like “controversial” to describe what’s going on. ABC News has certainly not been shy about calling it just that.
Let’s start with the lack of Catholic voices in much of the mainstream news media’s coverage. According to Pew Research, 70% of Florida’s population identifies as Christian. Catholicism is second within that category at 21%, after evangelical Christians, who are at 24%. Add to that DeSantis being a Roman Catholic, and it’s clear that voices from that side of the religion spectrum matter.
Bishop John Noonan, who heads the Diocese of Orlando, has said nothing about this new law — but that doesn’t mean the press can’t ask him or the diocese for comment.
So far, we haven’t seen any of that — a strange development given how much the press was interested in what various cardinals, archbishops and bishops had to say last year about whether President Joe Biden should not take Holy Communion because of his pro-abortion rights stance.
What about Catholic Disney employees? A lot has been made about the woke employees at Disney who have been pushing the company in recent weeks to take on DeSantis and the Florida legislature to oppose this bill. As Terry Mattingly noted the other day:
It is very common for Catholic leaders, or individual parishes, to create ministries for Catholics who are active in major institutions and industries. Are there Catholic clergy who are actively involved in ministry to the hundreds (maybe thousands) of Catholics who are “Disney workers”?
For example, in the past, the Disney Contemporary Resort has hosted Masses in its ballroom for travelers at Christmas and Easter. Also, the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary Queen of the Universe is a few miles from Walt Disney World. Surely there are other parishes that contain significant numbers of Disney personnel.
It turns out that a little online research and a look back at newspapers archives can yield many religion-beat story angles that have been currently ignored. Certainly, there are Catholic connections to Disney — and no shortage of people to quote who can present the other side of this story and reaction to the bill and the company’s very public stance against it.
Ben Reinhard, an English professor at Christendom College, wrote a piece for The Catholic World that was published on March 22. This was his take:
One might well object that I am making much ado about nothing. These are only children’s movies, after all — and children surely don’t pick up on these things, do they? Children just want to be entertained by pleasant characters, flashy colors, and catchy tunes; the message doesn’t matter. A six-year-old does not walk away from Encanto railing against the oppressive evil of traditional family roles, after all, so why worry?
This is an understandable but fatal miscalculation — and very nearly opposite the truth. As philosophers and poets from Plato to Dante to C.S. Lewis recognized, stories are a foundational part of a child’s education: the story reflects the author’s understanding of reality and recreates in the minds of the audience. As a consequence, very few things matter as much as the stories we tell to the young. They shape the child’s identity, his notions of good and evil, and the how he understands his place in the world.
Thus, whether or not he consciously “picks up on” a film’s message is wholly irrelevant. He will still absorb it — and all the more powerfully because he is unaware that he is doing so. And so a child raised on a steady diet of these films is conditioned to regard any constraint on his freedom of expression as an exercise of tyranny, developing a habitual mistrust for authority, limits, and tradition — especially of the local and parental variety.
Those interested in this topic can probe the work of C.S. Lewis (Anglican) and J.R.R. Tolkien (Catholic), focusing on the concept of the “baptism of the imagination.”
Reinhard concludes with this:
Brief acquaintance with Disney’s recent history leaves little doubt as to which path the corporation has chosen. The vague feminism and multiculturalism of the Disney 1990s has given way to strident LGBT and anti-familial advocacy in the 2020s. The signs of the shift are everywhere: whether in the rehabilitation of formerly diabolical characters, or in the increasingly obvious homosexual subtexts in its children’s movies, or in the overt political machinations mentioned above, the Disney Company has taken its stand. It is past time for parents to do so as well.
Why not interview Reinhard regarding this topic, either for print or television, given how much coverage this bill continues to receive?
It may be because that would require some journalists to think twice about their newfound roles as activists. Many journalists do not want to explore the other side of this issue because they believe there isn’t one. Many reporters are urgently defining who is right and who is wrong on these issues.
After all, it’s easier to paraphrase that “bigoted” position and go into much more detail with sympathetic voices from the “Don’t Say Gay” side, allowing them to drive and frame the coverage.
It may explain why Christians, and Catholics specifically, are not part of the coverage.
Why would journalists want to seek out such people with a Disney connection?
For starters, look at those who help plan trips to Disney. With Easter coming up, there will be no shortage of Disney park visitors who will be there who also want to attend Mass. A quick Google search yielded several links that help Catholics figure out where they can go to church while visiting Orlando.
One link details that a Catholic Mass “is held at Disney World in the Fantasia Ballroom located at Disney’s Contemporary Resort.” Interesting. Why not go there to look for some Catholics to ask about this issue?
The second link, called Plan Disney and affiliated with the company, offers up this piece of advice for travelers.
If you are going to be at Walt Disney World on Christmas Day or Easter Sunday, in years past, Disney's Contemporary Resort has offered a Catholic Mass in the ballroom for both of those days. At any other time of the year, there is an absolutely gorgeous Church just about 3 miles away from Walt Disney World property. The Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary Queen of the Universe offers a Saturday vigil Mass as well as four Sunday Masses. You can easily get a taxi or an Uber from your resort over to the Shrine.
Yelp, which publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses, also provides a list of Catholic churches around Orlando and the theme park, where reporters can easily go and look for those Catholic voices right in the shadow of the Magic Kingdom.
Critics may refer to it as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, but it looks increasingly that the news media has decided instead “Don’t Say Catholic” whenever reporting about this new law that will have repercussions in the upcoming congressional midterm elections and for possibly years to come.
This post originally appeared at GetReligion.