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by Jim Holman.
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Most Hated

Impact of the Disney Boycott

By James McCoy

Economics has been called "the dismal science;" perhaps it's impossible, therefore, to measure a boycott's precise economic impact. Disney has been under a boycott, called for by the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights and the Southern Baptist Convention, for a few years now. Disney has also recently had its lowest earnings in a few years. Economics is not a hard science like forensics; murders can be solved by analysis of an emptied pistol, but "there's no smoking gun here," said Dwayne Hastings, a spokesman for the Southern Baptists. Nevertheless, their Ethics and Liberty Commission website devotes an entire webpage to "why boycott Disney," and has links with articles showing Disney profts are down.

Last January, the Daily News of Los Angeles ran a story headlined "Misery Mouse Club: Disney announces slumping profits." Part of the problem was ABC, which Disney acquired in 1996: "viewers have turned off the Big Four Networks and turned on dozens of cable alternatives," the Daily News said. One financial analyst said that "the underlying assumptions for running a network no longer work, really."

But Disney's "creative content" division, which includes merchandising and home videos -- precisely the most obvious things to be boycotted by consumers -- posted a 39 percent decline. These items are bought in Disney's 695 outlets; again, places past which angry parents would tow their children. But an analyst in the Daily News story gave basically the opposite reason: "it may mean the brand is so overexposed that it's not special anymore."

Disney's theme parks were up -- up 17 percent to $335 million in earnings -- with the Walt Disney World complex in Florida posting record attendance and a second park in France being contemplated (the first one almost bombed, one source told me, until it began serving wine).

Nobody in the mainstream media stories which I could find ascribed Disney's recent decline to the boycott. My call to an official Disney spokesman in Burbank had not been returned at press time. A Disney employee -- the former chairman of its lesbian and gay employees club -- spoke to me, however, not as an offical spokesman; but more on that later.

One financial analyst who is certain that the boycott is making an impact is John Clark, senior partner at Guardian Investments, a Catholic pro-life brokerage firm based in Front Royal, Virginia. Guardian Investments was founded, in a sense, to boycott systematically companies which make their money through products which are incompatible with Catholic moral teaching, such as pharmaceutical companies who research and market abortofacients. Clark says that his firm, which invests through St. Louis, Missouri-based Eisner Securities (no relation to Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney), has hundreds of clients, "and one of the things people say is: 'I don't want to buy stock in Disney.' If I had to pick one company whose stock is the most hated by our customers, that would be it." When Clark considers, therefore, that Disney shares have gone down 22 percent of late (from their all time high in May 1998), while allowing that "it's always difficult to say, 'this is the amount of dollars that they have lost because of that,'" he said, "it would be ridiculous to say that [the boycott] has done nothing," he said.

Clark extrapolates from himself ("I've got three little kids, a fourth on the way; I didn't spend about $100 on Disney this year"), from his customers, and from 15 million Southern Baptists, and reaches the conclusion that Disney has frittered away its "target audience" -- the 20 percent of American consumers who give it 80 percent of its business. "Again, you can't say definitely: 'it's having an impact,'" he said. "But Disney can't keep denying that it has some effect."

Ironically, Clark maintains, Disney's decisions are not driven solely by the bottom line. The Dogma film, which was to be distributed by Disney-controlled Miramax, is a case in point. "Nobody in their right mind would make an anti-religious movie to make money," Clark said, "it's never been done [successfully]." Why did Disney, which had hits last year in Shakespeare In Love and Life is Beautiful, almost buy into Dogma?

"Eisner," Clark replies, "has always had an agenda...."

Not so, says Robert L. Williams, who works in Disney's post-production department in Burbank. "No," he replied, when asked about any hidden agenda. "This is the bottom line: it's about making money." Economics, said Williams, lay behind another Southern Baptist boycott target -- Disney's policy of giving homosexual employees benefits for their live-in partners while denying them to unmarried heterosexual couples. "The reason the domestic partner gets benefits at Disney," said Williams, "is not out of altruism or kindness, but because they were losing employees to other companies. They want to be competitive with Dreamworks and Universal." Benefits for a same-sex domestic partner, according to Williams, are an entertainment industry standard.

Williams is a former co-chairman of the lesbian and gay employees club at Disney, which he said the corporation recognizes as "one of the clubs, like Weight Watchers." "It's actually quite funny," Williams acknowledged, "first they say, 'you shouldn't be shacking up...." But as Williams explained it: a heterosexual couple can demonstrate that they're long-range simply by getting married; "If I were to marry tomorrow my partner would get benefits, if I were straight," Williams said. Since the state does not yet recognize homosexual marriage, "criteria for gays to get benefits have to be met," said Williams.

Among these criteria: "They have to be financially dependent," Williams said, "which means joint bank accounts; they have to prove that they have lived together for a year...."

I asked Williams whether the possibility of benefits had, to his knowledge, led gay Disney employees to set up households at a higher-than-average rate. "No, I don't think people go out and say, 'I can get benefits,'" he replied.

Once upon a time Walt Disney had gathered about himself a team of "imagineers" -- engineers whose job was to imagine the utopia towards which Walt Disney World in Florida was the first attempt at building. But Williams doubts that any imagineers still planning at Disney are interested in social engineering. "There's gay people who work for Disney," he said, "there's gay people who work for your bank...." Even those notorious "Gay Days" at Disney World are just a "big misunderstanding," he said. "When it comes to 'Gay Day', it's not a Disney-sponsored event. Any group can go to Disneyland and say, 'today's going to be 'Whatever Day.' It's not Disney's policy to discriminate."

Williams understands, however, why Catholics, Baptists, and others are upset: "If you think of 'Disney', people automatically [think] 'children,' in a sense... If you were to say that a baseball player were gay," he said, "it almost spits on American common ideals."

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