The Chaos at The Hollywood Reporter Is Downright Trumpian
In Orson Welles’s enduring masterpiece, Citizen Kane, there is a scene where Kane, played by Welles, finishes his first day as the owner of a newspaper by printing a Declaration of Principles. Notably, it includes his promise to offer his readers “the truth” and that “no special interests are going to be allowed to interfere with that truth.” Later in the film, as Kane’s ideals are overwhelmed by his monstrous ego, his wife, upset by muckraking in his paper, chastises him over breakfast, saying, “Really Charles, people will think…” But Kane, cuts her off with, “What I tell them to think.”
These scenes, which neatly bookend Kane’s fall into disrepute, came to mind last week as I read details about the resignation of The Hollywood Reporter’s editorial director, Matt Belloni. There is no one person in this real-life drama who resembles Charles Foster Kane, but just as Kane’s curt dismissal of his wife’s question illuminates the loss of his journalistic integrity, THR’s dismissal of Belloni shows a similar turn to the dark side.
According to reporting in The Daily Beast and Variety, and my own knowledge of the situation, Belloni had clashed with the magazine’s president, Deanna Brown, and the co-CEO of their parent company, Valence Media’s Modi Wiczyk. Valence is also the owner of entertainment content producers MRC and Dick Clark Productions. Allegedly, and believably to me, Wiczyk wanted to be alerted about any THR articles that were in process that reflected badly on certain celebrities with whom Valence had a relationship and might affect the parent corporation’s business interests. Further, Wiczyk wanted the magazine to promote projects in which Valence had an investment. Brown, according to Variety, also wanted Belloni to pull back on “hard-hitting” reporting on the industry.