Hulu Slams Fox with Rollover Tags, Includes: "Right Wing Propaganda, Bias" *UPDATED — SECOND UPDATE – HULU Responds

And did they call the First Family a “black family in government housing?”

Someone over at Hulu thought they would be clever by using the rollover tags to describe the shows on Fox’s Hulu page as “Ring wing propaganda, corporate propaganda, bias, etc.”

What they wrote about President Obama is even more disturbing.

Is Hulu trying to project that they believe Fox believes that the Obamas are a “black family in government housing?” Or do they believe that the First Family is a “black family in government housing?” It seems awfully racially tinged.

I’ve reached out to Hulu for comment.

(h/t Carolyn)

*From the comments — SmokeyBehr: “It was probably someone from the NBC Universal side of things. The News Corp bunch wouldn’t pull stuff like that.”

Fox’s parent company is part owner of Hulu.

*UPDATE: More user comments —

From HiredMind Blog: “As a regular user of Hulu, I feel I must step in to provide some perspective here. Those tags are made up and added by the USERS. Repeat – not the staff at Hulu, the users. I am more than willing to jump on an organization whose staff attacks us (Defund NPR NOW!), but this is not the case here. Hulu has a lot of small-time independent lefty films, and we should work to bring more conservative media to it. But honestly I t think branding Hulu for the shenanigans of their users is a bit misleading.”

I wouldn’t classify it as branding, otherwise I wouldn’t have reached out to Hulu for clarification, but without such disclaimers it does make it misleading — misleading as to the tags’ origin. I’m happy to include Hulu’s remarks and correct/clarify when and where needed.

It seems that the course of action shouldn’t be tag wars between conservatives and progressives, but rather a legitimate way to vet user classification of Hulu content. I also agree with the comments that call for conservatives themselves to take up the mantle of contributing content, via film, etc., to Hulu.

*UPDATE #2: I had an exchange with a Hulu spokesperson who informed me that the tags used to describe the content of shows available on Hulu are indeed user-generated:

Tags are intended to help all users to discover new videos along useful new dimensions like genre, actors, year, language. Any user can use any tags to classify videos for themselves, but we only publish tags that are broadly useful for discovery. When we’re made aware of offensive, spam, or highly subjective tags, we remove them.

We are in the process of removing the tags in your story. You may need to clear the cache in order to see the removal.