Republican Sen. Josh Hawley spent a good portion of his questioning at a Senate hearing on the potential Netflix-Warner Bros. acquisition accusing the streamer and co-CEO Ted Sarandos of promoting a “transgender ideology” without providing any evidence or specific examples.
“Almost half of your content for children — I’m talking about minor children, I’m not talking about teenagers — promotes a transgender ideology,” the Missouri Senator said without providing specific evidence.
Sarandos pushed back on the claim, saying that Netflix has “millions of hours of children’s programming.”
“We have state of the art tools for you to manage those choices for your children and to block any title that you might be offended by for any reason. We are parents at Netflix as well. We share all your concerns about raising kids and also the ability to raise them as you see fit in your household,” he said.
Hawley’s fellow Missouri Senator, Eric Schmitt, took a similar line of questioning, citing a report from far-right think tank The Oversight Project that 41% of G-rated content on Netflix “contains LGBTQIA content.” Sen. Schmitt specifically cited the 2020 French drama “Cuties,” which embroiled Netflix in a scandal when it marketed the film with a promotional picture that showed its underage protagonists in sexually provocative attire, though the film was given a mature rating rather than a G rating.
“It seems as though you have, you have engaged in creating not only a monopoly of content potentially, but the wokest content in the history of the world,” claimed Schmitt.
The Oversight Project’s 47-page paper published earlier this week opposed the Netflix-Warner merger, accusing the streamer of “holding an outsized role in socially engineering millions of Americans into a predisposition to accept preferred leftwing ideological dogma.”
But any serious challenge to blocking Warner Bros.’ sale to Netflix or any other major studio will have to come on antitrust grounds, as other senators on both sides of the aisle raised concerns about competitiveness in the entertainment industry to Sarandos.
“Consolidating two major employers in the same market inevitably have an impact on the competition for that labor,” Republican Sen. Mike Lee said, adding that Netflix could “withhold marquee titles, it could raise licensing fees, it could favor its own content with recommendations on a platform of Netflix’s size and reach.”
Netflix has met with the U.S. Department of Justice, several attorneys general for states with major entertainment industries, and European Union regulators about the potential merger. Sarandos has also met with President Donald Trump, who has expressed personal interest in the merger and has a deep prior relationship to Larry and David Ellison, the latter of whom is CEO of Paramount Skydance.
“I worry about the context in which this merger is going to be evaluated by actors that I do not think are independent,” Democratic Sen. Cory Booker told the hearing and Sarandos near the end of the session.
Sarandos told the committee under oath that he did not specifically discuss the Warner Bros. acquisition with Trump during their meeting.
“I think the President, from my experience, has been nothing but interest in protecting and creating American jobs,” Sarandos insisted, adding that he believed it was “wholly proper for the President of the United States to talk to leaders of industry to discuss about the industries they’re running.”
