Despite Grinding Businesses Into The Ground And Destroying The Fabric Of Societies, Paramount CEO Bob Bakish Declares “We Will Be More Successful With DE&I At The Core Of Our Business”
Paramount CEO Bob Bakish made the foolish and utterly inane pronouncement that his company will be more successful by embracing destructive diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are objectively terrible for business and societies. Bud Light parent company Anheuser-Busch Inbev reported in August that the company’s U.S. revenue fell a whopping 10.5% after it faced a boycott from Americans for promoting “transgender” ideology.
Volition Games was shut down by Embracer Group after they embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in their Saints Row reboot game. The game’s sales were atrocious.
The Walt Disney Company is facing a hostile takeover from investor Nelson Peltz after they campaigned against a bill trying to prevent children in Kindergarten through third grade from being exposed to instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Not only did Disney try to stop the state of Florida from preventing child abuse, but their box office grosses have tanked as they pumped out woke film after woke film. Their Disney+ streaming service full of woke programming loses millions of dollars every quarter. The list goes on.
Despite this overwhelming evidence of how disastrous these policies are The Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Zsalai reports that Paramount CEO Bob Bakish attended Paramount Global’s 5th annual global Inclusion Week where he declared, “I, our senior leadership team and our board believe that we will be more successful with DE&I at the core of our business.”
He added, “We all come from different places, and understanding people’s perspectives is actually what this week is all about. Diversity, equity and inclusion is fundamental to our business.”
Bakish was not alone in his comments. Marva Smalls, Paramount’s executive VP and head of the Office of Global Inclusion revealed the whole DIE initiative the company has embraced was a United Kingdom government action.
She said, “Inclusion Week actually began in the U.K. in 2018 in response to a call to action from the U.K. government for corporations to really spotlight the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion.”
“It ignited something in us to say ‘Wow, what a great concept to create an immersive experience to amplify our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion,” she continued. “So we took that seed of an idea from the U.K. and then in 2019 amplified it across our footprint, with heavy emphasis in the U.K., the U.S., Los Angeles with a theme of Be You – Belong.”
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Smalls would go on to try and justify these failed policies that are in the process of ruining once-lauded companies, “For us, the business case for diversity is the business. It is not something we do in our spare time and pull off a shelf to check the box.”
She elaborated, “So it is not about a transaction, but it is really personalized, deeply-seeded and rooted in our business practices every day. When we say inclusion is Paramount, we mean inclusion is paramount. So while we have this immersive experience once a year, not unlike other programs, it is just knitted and threaded together as part of the fabric.”
She went on to reveal how integrated these policies are into the business of Paramount, “It is integrated and there is a steady cadence. We also have Bob (Bakish) in our senior leadership team meeting. We talk about the DE&I in that meeting.”
“It is so seamlessly integrated,” Smalls asserted. “We don’t have to say, ‘Oh, today is the diversity moment.’ Inclusion Week is not unlike TED talks that are curated to create this moment of immersion and retooling.”
Smalls said, “Times of challenges and uncertainty where some communities may feel marginalized or disenfranchised are just a reminder that the core values of Paramount mean that we never take our foot off the gas and drive a culture that is very equitable, inclusive, and that creates a sense of belonging.”
“What we also hope to be is a model for the industry and all like-minded partners in this space that we really can create the change we want to see,” she added.
Ironically, former Marvel Studios VP Victoria Alonso made similar comments at the height of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Back at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2021, Alonso explained Marvel’s business, “The reason we have that success consistently is because our audience is global. You cannot have a global audience and not somehow start to represent it… For us, it was really, really, really important to have that.”
She continued, “For the longest of time, we heard a woman-led film will never open. I say, ‘Please check, Captain Marvel made a lot of money.’ Then they always told us that Black Panther was never going to open and that nobody wanted a completely black cast, and that made $1.3B.”
“So you can look at it from the social point of view, the cultural point of view. But truthfully, this is a business. From a fiscal point of view, you are leaving money on the table by not representing,” she explained.
She then provided some numbers about Marvel’s audience, “I think 51% of our audience is female, 28% of our audience is Hispanic. If we don’t represent the people that watch what we make, eventually they’ll go elsewhere because somebody else will figure it out.”
Alonso concluded, “We can only tell stories if we succeed and actually have money to make them. So the idea being, ‘If it makes money, why not make it?’ To me it seemed like a very simple equation, but it took a lot of time, a lot of talking.”
Alonso is no longer with Marvel Studios and it has had a string of box office losers that embraced this model including this year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania.
In June, one analyst estimated The Walt Disney Company, Marvel Studios’ parent company, had lost nearly $900 million at the box office in just the last year.
Clearly, Paramount does not see the massive warning signs telling them that these policies are atrocious and suicidal.
It begs the question of how long until a Nelson Peltz comes knocking at their door?
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