I Watched All of the Daily Wire’s New Children’s Shows So You Don’t Have To – By Dan Kois (Slate) / Oct 24, 2023
The right-wing Disney+ comes complete with its own takes on Bluey and Mister Rogers. Also: trigger warnings?
Are you the kind of parent who is afraid that Big Media is attempting to brainwash your child, or make him feel bad about slavery, or teach him that gay people are human beings? Conservative media organization the Daily Wire is here for you. Last week, the company launched Bentkey, a streaming network of children’s entertainment for, in the words of Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing, “Americans who believe in basic reality.”
Boreing has pitched Bentkey as a direct response to Disney’s perceived sins of wokeness, and in fact he made a point of launching the channel on Disney’s 100th anniversary. “Walt Disney loved America,” Boreing writes, but “the company he founded seems to think America is systemically racist.” Bentkey, he declares, is an attempt to save America’s children from the company that is attempting “to indoctrinate those children into the LGBTQIA cult.”
So what does a conservative children’s network look like? How do you create “the next generation of timeless stories that transport kids into a world of adventure, imagination and joy” but also make sure it doesn’t seem like Disney? Visit Bentkey’s site or download the app, and it looks quite a bit like every other collection of children’s TV on the internet. (There’s no mission statement proclaiming “traditional American values” or even any Daily Wire branding anywhere on the Bentkey portal.) But spend a few days sampling Bentkey’s programming—including the four series, so far, produced by the company—and you might pick out a few subtle notes cluing you in that something a little different is going on here.
CONTINUE > https://slate.com/culture/2023/10/daily-wire-bentkey-disney-snow-white-bluey-chip-chilla.html
