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It’s worth grilling Netflix on its Warner Bros. deal. Senate Republicans did something else.
Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos surely knew he’d be asked some stupid, blatantly partisan questions during his testimony before a Senate judiciary subcommittee exploring his company’s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. But I’m not sure even someone as politically savvy as Sarandos could have been prepared for just how dumb things got during his roughly two-hour appearance Tuesday. Instead of an intelligent, reasonable exploration of the historic harms of corporate consolidation, the MAGA Republicans who dominated the panel used their questions to create more content for the right-wing outrage machine. So we got Ted Cruz calling out Sarandos for not being willing to disagree with Billie Eilish’s correct statements about the U.S. being founded on “stolen land” and countless transphobic, factually incorrect diatribes about Netflix kids’ programming. (They’re still not over Cuties.)
But the award for most ridiculous performance by an elected official went to Missouri senator Eric Schmitt, who suggested the Warner Bros. deal should be blocked because, among other things, “99 percent of [Netflix] employees contribute to Democrats” (an amazing claim, given nearly 40 percent of the global giant’s staffers aren’t even Americans, and Netflix doesn’t have its own PAC or internal political-donation programs) and former U.N. ambassador Susan Rice — or, as Schmitt called her, “the founder of Barack Obama’s DEI agenda” — is on Netflix’s board of directors. Does he know that Fox News has an actual Trump family member on its payroll? “It seems as though you have engaged in creating not only a monopoly of content potentially, but the wokest content in the history of the world,” Schmitt went on as he worked himself into a lather. “The overwhelming majority of your stuff right now is overwhelmingly woke, and it’s not reflective of what the American public wants to see.”
I very much wanted Sarandos to respond by asking the senator why that same American public has made Netflix the most popular streaming subscription service in the country by far, or why its shows regularly attract tens of millions of viewers — far more than, say, the very un-woke Fox News Channel or the MAGA-coded Great American Family cable network. Instead, Sarandos bit his tongue for what must have been the 20th time that afternoon and offered the mildest of disagreements, saying only that most Americans don’t view Netflix as either Republican or Democratic.
I’m sure some will say Sarandos and Netflix demonstrated cowardice by not pushing back more forcefully, but honestly? I don’t blame them for staying silent. The attacks were not made in good faith and were factually suspect (at minimum). Any sharp rebuttals would just give the senators what they wanted: clippable, virally shareable verbal fireworks that would prompt wider coverage of their nonsense narrative.
There are obviously very good reasons for legislators to worry about Netflix’s plans for Warner Bros. and Hollywood consolidation in general; New Jersey Democratic senator Cory Booker gently tried to push Sarandos on some of those. But for the most part, what took place Tuesday wasn’t about holding anyone to account or revealing some truth. It was just another skirmish in MAGA’s culture wars, aimed at giving the movement’s base its daily dose of Things to Be Mad About. Sarandos was wise to avoid taking the bait.
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