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October 18, 2003

Gregg Easterbrook, Non-Person

Gregg Easterbrook is a New Republic editor who dislikes violent movies. In a recent review of Kill Bill, he wrote:

All of Tarantino's work is pure junk. How can you be a renowned director without ever having made a film that's even good, to say nothing of great? No film student in 50 years will spend a single second with a Tarantino movie, except to shake his or her head.
Not too favorable. But he went a bit further:
Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice.
And so, after decades of writing for publications such as the New Republic, Easterbrook was accused of being a rabid anti-Semite -- on the basis of one paragraph of one article written in anger.

Easterbrook has apologized to those who were offended, but that doesn't seem to have mollified everyone, particularly not one Michael Eisner.

It seems Easterbrook also writes a weekly column for ESPN on football, called TMQ. ESPN is owned by Disney, which is run by Michael Eisner, who was singled out for criticism in the the Kill Bill review.

Apparently, Michael Eisner does not suffer criticism well, because today, not only was Gregg Easterbrook fired from ESPN, but ALL of his articles since forever have been pulled from the ESPN site.

Try it -- go Google "site:espn.go.com gregg easterbrook" -- see what comes up. Lots. Then try accessing one...

Lots of links over at InstaPundit

Given the clear 1984 theme here, I have one question: How many fingers am I holding up, Mr Eisner?

Posted by Kevin Murphy at October 18, 2003 05:16 PM | TrackBack