Disney may be scrapping a lot of its diversity programs as Donald Trump‘s war on inclusion intensifies. However, House of Mouse’s shareholders today made a very timely and strong rejection of some MAGA efforts to gain control of corporate governance.
In balloting at the Bob Iger-run media giant’s virtual annual shareholders meetings this morning, Disney investors solidly voted down an effort to cut ties with a respected equality study from a top LGBTQ+ group. Following unanimous recommendations from the James Gorman chaired board, the shareholders also said No to a Elon Musk inclined measure to probe Disney’s alleged moves in recent years “to demonetize platforms, podcasts, news outlets, and others for expressing disfavored political and religious viewpoints.”
“We have received proxies for approximately 7% of shares voting to approve the proposal for Item five, relating to consideration of participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index,” Disney officials announced after the voting on proposals was completed. “We have received proxies for approximately 1% of shares voting to approve the proposal for item six, relating to a report on request related to selection of ad buyers and sellers.”
With that, as the board election went through as did compensation and several other proposals, Disney’s Legal EVP Horacio E. Gutierrez declared the blatantly political items “are not approved.”
On a sheer practical level, the shunning of the Trump tinged measures, was a bit of a no-brainer in terms of Disney’s executives being actually able to run the company and conduct business as a global brand.
Elon Musk
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for The New York Times
With references to Musk, X and the pulling of advertising from the social media platform in late 2023 after the now DOGE boss personally endorsed an antisemitic post, the Respect Civil Liberties in Advertising Services proposal came out against the now-shuttered Global Alliance for Responsible Media. Specifically, the proposal resolved: “Shareholders request the Board of Directors of The Walt Disney Company conduct an evaluation and issue a report within the next year, at reasonable cost and excluding proprietary information and confidential information, evaluating how it oversees risks related to discrimination against ad buyers and sellers based on their political or religious status or views.”
Even more nakedly MAGA, the Request to Cease CEI Participation proposal claims the perfect score Disney has received from the Human Rights Campaign’s annual Corporate Equality Index since 2007 is bad for business.
“The threat of a bad score is wielded against corporations to force them to do the political bidding of HRC and others (like GLSEN, the Trevor Project and GLAAD, which Disney also has paid partnerships with) that seek to sow gender confusion in children, encourage irreversible surgical procedures on confused teens, effectively eliminate girls’ and women’s sports and bathrooms, and roll back longstanding religious liberties,” the item said. Noting how Lowe’s, Ford, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, Tractor Supply and Toyota have all dropped out of HRC’s CEI since Trump 2.0 started, the proposal makes a leap of ugly faith by equating the company’s participation in the index as the one of the reason for Disney’s share price going down in the last few years.
Terms like “divisive agenda ahead of parental rights and political neutrality and “partisan behavior” were used in the proposal from the extremly conservative National Center for Public Policy Research and it through its Free Enterprise Project arm. There is a unsettling irony to this as the increasingly politically risk adverse Iger has been stressing over and over of late that he isn’t interested in ideological dust-ups anymore and Disney’s “primary mission as a company is to entertain”
In its unanimous recommendation to reject the proposal, the board picked up on Iger’s Do No Evil stance and took a very bottom line approach. “Given the Company’s existing practices to assess participation in transparency efforts and the Board’s oversight of ESG reporting, workforce equity matters and human rights policies, we do not believe this proposal would provide additional value to shareholders.”
