The Patriot Post® · Why Is Netflix Paying the Obamas So Much?
Netflix stock is likely to surge on the recent news that the platform added 2.4 million subscribers in the last quarter, surpassing expectations and reversing a downward trend that saw its subscriber base plummet earlier this year.
Two people who will benefit greatly from this news are Barack and Michelle Obama. Their television production company, Higher Ground, signed a multi-year, nine-figure deal with Netflix in 2018 to create scripted and unscripted series, features, and documentaries for the streaming service. And Netflix’s recent subscriber uptick means more eyeballs for Obama-produced content. Lucky them.
Higher Ground is key to the Obamas’ long-term plan to leverage media as a way to continue foisting their leftist agenda on the American public. And since their company’s first foray into television with 2020’s “American Factory,” the Obamas have produced several programs that sell liberal puff pieces masked as legitimate documentaries.
“American Factory,” a pro-Chinese look at the takeover of an Ohio factory by Chinese investors, was followed earlier this year by “Our Great National Parks,” a vapid look at parks around the world that was hosted by Obama and that laid bare the former president’s hypocritical stance on environmental preservation. In the doc, he opines about protecting the environment while in the real world he circumvents environmental conservation laws in Hawaii so he can build his oceanfront paradise.
The latest gem from Higher Ground is “The G-Word,” a six-part series about how the government interacts with our lives. It’s hosted by Adam Conover, a comedian who gained notoriety for his myth-busting show “Adam Ruins Everything.” Each episode focuses on a different facet of the government’s interaction with us: food, weather, money, the future, disease, and change. Obama appears in the last episode so that Conover can shamelessly gush over how well the former president makes a sandwich.
“The G Word” reveals very little about the government that people don’t already know, and it’s very careful to sidestep the numerous ways the government interferes with and ruins our private lives. It’s essentially pro-government propaganda that pushes the message Obama has embraced throughout his political career: Our lives are best managed by an unquestioned and unaccountable centralized authority.
Labeling a film or program a “documentary” no longer conveys the same meaning it once did. A documentary used to be a fact-based study of a particular subject that attempted to portray different sides of an issue and inform its audience. Sadly, leftist filmmaker Michael Moore changed all that with films like “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 9/11.” These days, documentaries are often little more than ideological and political weapons to influence public opinion and attack opposing views.
The so-called documentaries produced by the Obamas fall into this category. The media naturally claims that all the work Higher Ground produces is worthy of high praise, a typically sycophantic response. Hopefully Netflix subscribers can see through it.
Image credit: Dennis Jarvis, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.