There’s a price to pay to be woke. Sometimes, that price is steep.
Take the A&E television network. The brass decided to show just how much they care about racism and police brutality by canceling the network’s most popular offering, the police reality show Live PD.
There were no examples of racism on the show and no police brutality. But they were portraying cops in a positive light and, well, we just can’t have that in Woke America.
A&E canceled “Live PD” on June 10 in response to protests over the death of George Floyd, who died in police custody on May 25 after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck, video shows. “Live PD” gave viewers an inside look at how police officers responded to incidents across the country.
“This is a critical time in our nation’s history and we have made the decision to cease production on Live PD. Going forward, we will determine if there is a clear pathway to tell the stories of both the community and the police officers whose role it is to serve them,” A&E said in a June 10 statement after cancelling “Live PD,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Watching grownups doing double-somersault backflips to pander to a vicious mob would ordinarily be fodder for entertainment. But watching big-time TV executives shaking in their boots and pissing in their pants, terrified that someone will call them “racist” for…something and then groveling to placate those who can’t be placated is sickening and not very entertaining.
They are paying a price.
Between June 11 and July 19, the network averaged 498,000 prime-time viewers every night, according to Nielsen data, The Wall Street Journal reported. That represented a 49% decrease in prime-time viewership compared to the same period in 2019.
“Live PD” averaged 1.9 million viewers on Friday and Saturday nights, according to the Journal. Clips of the show routinely racked up millions of views on A&E’s YouTube channel.
Prior to the show’s cancellation, the network’s prime-time viewership was up 4%, Nielsen data show, according to the Journal.
A&E is part of a family of cable networks that include Lifetime, the History Channel, and FYI. Its parent is the Walt Disney Company, which makes it very large indeed. They made a corporate decision to pander to the mob, perhaps figuring that whatever they lost in revenue would be made up in the positive image they were projecting.
The network has yet to rule out a return of Live PD according to DC. I’ve got news for them. Any hint of backsliding and the mob will descend on them with a vengeance. They are kidding themselves if they believe they can bring that show back in a couple of months or even a couple of years.
That’s not how it works in the new Woke America.
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