Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos needs to explain why the technology company removed a documentary about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas from its streaming service, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.
Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, a film profiling Thomas built upon hours of original interviews with the justice and his wife Virginia, was delisted from Amazon Prime in February, during Black History Month.
Amazon launched an “Amplify Black Voices” campaign in February while claiming to be “building an inclusive culture.”
Marlow said, “I have to ask you about … Amazon pulling [this] documentary, which I’ve seen — it’s wonderful — and I can’t believe this is happening. It’s so scary, but what are you doing here?”
Cotton replied, “Isn’t it a remarkable double standard that you can go on Amazon and get a documentary about the Weather Underground — a left-wing terrorist organization that firebombs buildings across our country? But you can’t get a documentary about one of the most courageous uplifting stories of a public man in recent American history.”
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“Amazon just inexplicably pulled this documentary about Clarence Thomas in the middle of Black History Month without any explanation,” he added. “So I and several other senators have written Jeff Bezos seeking answers on why this happened.”
Marlow responded, “I certainly hope you get them because this is an outrage. If the shoe was on the other foot, of course, it would be called racism.”
Cotton highlighted Twitter’s recently trending hashtag, #UncleTim — after Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-SC) response to President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday — as an example of Big Tech’s left-wing orientation.
“Look what happened to Tim Scott,” he remarked. “Tim Scott gives a good response the other night defending America, gets scurrilous charges of racism, and on social media, ‘Uncle Tim’ immediately starts trending — something he mentioned in his speech, [that] he gets called for being an African American Republican. Social media took 12 hours to even take that down from its algorithms. How long do you think it would have taken if it was Kamala Harris or Barack Obama?”
In a letter to Bezos, Cotton and 18 other Republican senators contrasted Amazon’s cancellation of Created Equal with the company’s hosting of documentaries celebrating left-wing domestic terrorists. They wrote:
Elsewhere in Amazon Prime’s movie descriptions, Amazon celebrates the FBI’s most wanted terrorist Joanne Chesimard, who murdered a state trooper in cold blood, as a “fantastic feminine freedom fighter” and hails the Weather Underground — a literal terrorist group — as “radical politics at its best[.]” Both films remain available for streaming today.
These decisions suggest that Amazon removes documentaries that feature conservatives while keeping documentaries that celebrate criminals and terrorists. And despite repeated inquiries by media outlets, the filmmakers, and would-be viewers, Amazon appears to have made no effort to explain otherwise.
On Thursday, Cotton tweeted, “Amazon’s decision to pull Justice Thomas’ documentary from their streaming service makes it clear Amazon isn’t concerned with ‘Amplifying Black Voices,’ they’re only concerned with ‘Amplifying Liberal Black Voices.'”
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