Next Christmas, we’ll have Hollywood’s latest attack on a prominent conservative gift wrapped under our tree.
Notoriously liberal Adam McKay is writing and directing a new film focused on Vice President Dick Cheney.
The film is slated to go into production early next year for a late 2017 release.
How liberal is McKay? He’s the co-founder of the hard-left FunnyOrDie.com satirical site alongside fellow progressive Will Ferrell. He directed last year’s The Big Short, an economic primer brimming with Krugman-esque talking points.
And he’s trying to bring a comedy about a dementia-riddled President Ronald Reagan to the big screen…sans apology.
“I’ve never been that close to a story like that where so little information became such a tidal wave. It was really crazy to behold,” McKay told the Daily Beast. “People hadn’t even read the script, it was just three words: ‘Reagan, Ferrell, Alzheimer’s,’ and it became this huge thing…it’s this culture we live in. It’s all about clicks, clicks, clicks and hits, hits, hits.”
Yet when prominent news outlets released summaries of the script, it was exactly as insulting as many feared.
So how did Deadline.com report the news of McKay’s Cheney project? By completely ignoring McKay’s ideological track record. Sometimes, liberal news bias is at its most outrageous when it leaves out critical details of a given story.
Instead, the site serves up this generic reaction quote from McKay:
“I’ve always found Cheney fascinating,” McKay told Deadline. “Questions of what drove him, what his beliefs were; but once we started digging I was astounded at how much he had shaped modern America’s place in the world and how shocking the methods were by which he gained his power.”
So what can we expect from the Cheney feature? McKay injects his biases to many of his screen projects, even those which seem apolitical on the surface. He produced the 2012 comedy The Campaign, a broadside against too much cash flooding our political system. What could have been a nonpartisan screed devolved into a thinly veiled attack on the Koch brothers.
He tacked on an anti-Wall Street diatribe at the end of his otherwise silly 2010 comedy The Other Guys.
Is there any chance he’ll deliver a fair and balanced look at Cheney’s political career? We certainly won’t know until the film hits theaters, but it’s Deadline.com’s responsibility to give context to the movie announcement and what it might include.
They failed.
Now, imagine Jon Voight decided to star and produce a feature based on, say, outgoing President Barack Obama. Do you think Voight’s political leanings would be left out of the story? That would probably be the lede paragraph.
It’s just business as usual in Hollywood….and the news outlets assigned to cover the industry.
