quote:
Former HBO Max executives say the streaming service has been left with few people of color to oversee its diverse slate of programming as Warner Bros. Discovery continues its ongoing corporate reshuffling.

The platform reportedly laid off close to 70 people this month. That includes the entire teams overseeing unscripted, kids and family, and international content, according to two former HBO Max execs who asked not to be named

All about race with these anonymous sources. They couldn't care less about good content. Only about quotas.

quote:
“I don’t think anyone knows just how white the staff is,” one former executive told The Daily Beast.

Former HBO Max staffers say there are barely any non-white people left in the upper ranks of content, with one naming Joey Chavez, an executive vice president of drama, as one of the few people of color still there. Because HBO Max and the original HBO channel operate somewhat independently, one former executive conceded that “there may be one Black woman on the HBO side. Maybe.”

Then we get to the kicker:

quote:
Discovery CEO David Zaslav was charged with helping Warner crawl out of a $50 billion hole. He came in like a wrecking ball, tearing up CNN’s $300 million streaming service CNN+ and vowing to pull the Warner-owned news channel away from “advocacy” journalism.

quote:
One former exec describes Discovery+ as a “more general audience platform that doesn’t have the specificity that HBO Max was tailored to. I think Discovery is just a very ‘all’ audience, [they] don’t wanna make things that are political, topical, alienate Middle America—more Chip and Joanna,” they said, referring to the home renovation show Fixer Upper: Welcome Home hosted by Chip and Joanna Gaines.

I mean...if Discovery wasn't facing a $50B hole prior to the merger, then I'd say they're doing far better than WB financially and that's probably why they're having this guy take over. This "former exec's" unwillingness to understand that the ship needs to be righted to become profitable probably has a lot to do with why she was fired.

Somehow the article came to the conclusion below, but this is the only sentence where this is mentioned and they have no quoted text mentioning this at all from their source(s). Based on the quoted text, I don't know how the author came to this conclusion. It doesn't seem like the people he interviewed have this view at all.

quote:
Overall, there’s a sense that HBO Max’s executives of color were just another casualty in the company’s quest to get itself out of debt, content quality be damned.

It's funny that they mentioned "content quality" here, because the people quoted never used the words "content quality" at all. All they care about is quotas, not quality.

quote:
“In terms of people seeing themselves reflected, whether it’s ethnic or LGBTQ, when you have people who are diverse, the lens with which they evaluate [content] factors in things that I think my white colleagues just don’t think about,” one former executive said.

“It’s deep,” said another. “What are they going to do with this disproportionate amount of people of color that were let go? They need to replace them in some capacity. Or do they not care? That’s what we’ve been told, that they just don’t care.”

Or, and stay with me here: corporations exist to make money. They care about making money. They can't exist on "$50B holes." If you think what you were doing was profitable (which is an assumption I'm making, because they never made this claim), then go start your own company and put out that content. Show the world that WB Discovery is wrong. No one has to hand you a paycheck for you to do that. I look forward to witnessing the results.

This post was edited on 8/29/22 at 10:10 am