Culture wars hit where it hurts
Even for ‘Roseanne,’ ABC didn’t hesitate
Even by the standards of recent quick corporate reactions to scandal, ABC’s fast action to cancel Roseanne Barr’s TV show appears to signal a watershed moment in the culture wars.
Less than 12 hours after Barr’s racist tweet about former Obama administration official Valerie Jarrett, the network shut down Roseanne, a popular reboot featuring a pro-Trump star that allowed ABC to deflect criticism that it showcased only liberal fare.
That decision — lauded by Barr’s critics and blasted by her fans — speaks to a fraught new corporate era in which companies have been pushed to the front lines of the nation’s contentious cultural debates. In this battleground, swift responses often are seen as the only way to contain a social media firestorm.
“You’re looking at a very 21st-century challenge,” says Jay Tucker, executive director at the Center for Media, Entertainment & Sports at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. “In an earlier (TV) era, it would have taken half a season to make that decision after much internal analysis.”
ABC had consciously courted controversy with a return of a prime-time sitcom whose star had a track record of offensive statements and whose subject — the namesake is a white, working-class supporter of the president
who’s often in conflict with family members over issues such as immigration — was determined to be political from the start.
But ABC’s defense of the show disappeared after Barr’s since-deleted tweet about Jarrett, on the same day that Starbucks shuttered its shops to hold anti-bias training on the heels of its own crisis over racial profiling.
ABC’s Channing Dungey, the first African American to head programming at a major broadcast network, canceled a breakout hit that had boosted the network’s ratings, attracting an average of 23 million viewers.
In taking action, Dungey may have avoided an ugly backlash against the network. But the network now faces a backlash from other quarters. Many of Barr’s fans blame the show’s cancellation on political correctness and are threatening a boycott of their own.
And President Trump amplified the outcry by weighing in personally and accusing ABC of liberal media bias. He pointed out that the network had not apologized to him for the “HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn’t get the call?”
While ABC’s nearly instant decision to pull the plug on Roseanne stands out for its speed, the network is far from alone in facing fast-paced corporate decisions in the wake of brewing crises.
After two African-American men were led out of a Philadelphia Starbucks store in handcuffs last month because they refused to make a purchase, the company’s CEO apologized to them two days later. Calls for a boycott had already started to spread on social media.
Mishandling of race in advertising or customer interactions prompted Dove, H&M and Old Navy, among others, to apologize in the past year.
Companies have moved quickly to cool outrage over other social issues, too. In November, Netflix fired Kevin Spacey, star of its hit series House of Cards, four days after allegations of sexual harassment surfaced against him. And last summer, Google engineer James Damore was fired by the tech giant two days after a memo he wrote was leaked and went viral in which he argued that gender differences could ex- plain why most of Google’s engineers and leaders are men.
Corporations are making quick calls to avoid damage in a social media age in which angry tweets and Facebook posts go viral, says Columbia Business School professor William Klepper.
“People have been around this circuit too many times,” Klepper says. “Now it’s an issue of: State your values. State what you stand for. Hold to your code of ethics. But if you delay, try to explain away or, worse yet, you try to defend, it’s a lose-lose today.”
ABC’s Dungey initially had counted on Barr’s show to serve as a cultural counterpoint to a lineup that includes shows pointedly focused on non-white families, including Black-ish and Fresh Off The Boat. But Barr’s comments on Twitter, for which she apologized as a “bad joke,” seemed a bridge too far for ABC. Dungey condemned Barr’s tweet comparing Jarrett to a love child of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes as “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.”
One media observer believes the speed with which Roseanne was canceled suggests Dungey perhaps already had a plan in place should the star step too far out of bounds.
“We all have a right to say what we want to say,” says Nsenga Burton, an expert on race and politics and chair of mass media at Clark Atlanta University. “But what companies are learning is that you can stand for freedom of expression but not necessarily consequence-free freedom of expression.”
And had ABC not canceled the show, what then?
Color of Change executive director Rashad Robinson says his organization would have pushed advertisers on the show to reconsider how they spend their ad dollars.
“Advertisers would not have been able to hide from a simple question: ‘Are you going to put your corporate brand next to people who say things like this, and are likely to say things like this again and again?’ ” he says.
UCLA’s Tucker says it may well be a while before an identical storm to Roseanne brews.
“People don’t usual write about other people in the way that Roseanne just did,” he says. “And as much as ABC supported the show, a person had to be held accountable.”