Rotten: Hollywood’s Shocking Media Bias
In the race for votes, there couldn’t have been a starker contrast between the two campaigns. It was the juggernaut versus the buffoons.
The juggernaut was hands down the overwhelming favorite. Their campaign had an enormous funding advantage – a whopping three times more than the challenger. On the issues, it unabashedly portrayed Hispanics as victims, and placed amnesty and universal healthcare front and center –seamlessly aligning with the “global community.” The underdog challenger, on the other hand, was thought to be a bona fide laughingstock…with an approach that appeared destined to turn off conservatives. Its campaign thrived on crude language and insults, and even included shocking dick jokes, accusations of parent/child incest, and a wife with a penchant for posing nude – traits that grossly undercut its message of the importance of family. And the challenger took a diametrically different approach to the issues – showcasing the problems of our porous southern border and drug trafficking. But perhaps most notably, the media hated the challenger…with a passion. At the time the race started, the pundit class gave the favorite a 66% approval rating – the raunchy underdog a paltry 29%. So when early voting kicked off, you wouldn’t have been alone in thinking that the challenger was going to lose in a historic landslide. But as the numbers started rolling in, the two were inexplicably neck and neck.
Then something surprising happened. Conservatives put the crass and lewd behavior aside, and began to rally around the underdog – unbelievably buying into the campaign’s family shtick. Through the glass shattering shrieks of the elite pundits, the challenger found an audience in the South and Midwest. In the end, when all of the American votes were tallied up – to the astonishment of anyone paying attention – the underfunded, lampooned challenger defeated the juggernaut. The critics couldn’t have been more wrong.
Of course, you may think I’m talking about Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton, but you’d be mistaken. The above traces the battle between two movies – Elysium and We’re the Millers – and highlights a systemic media problem that has also reached into the film industry. Simply put, media critics are as miserably out of touch with Middle America as their political pundit brethren.
The 2013 battle between the dystopian blockbuster-budgeted Elysium and the lowbrow hit comedy We’re the Millers – both launching in the same week – bares a striking resemblance to the 2016 presidential election campaign. Both events reveal a troublesome media bias. But where liberal politicians profit from this slant, the U.S. movie industry does not.
Although U.S. box office revenues have grown annually – due solely to increased ticket prices – domestic ticket sales have been on a steady decline. From a height of 1.58 billion domestic tickets sold in 2002, that number has decreased by over a quarter of a billion tickets in 2016.
And this decrease surprisingly comes with an increase in both the number of U.S. movie screens and the number of films being made each year.
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