Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Miley Cyrus: Disney's Kiddie Lingerie Billboard Advertises Hypocrisy:

Disney's hypocrisy has been on display since the start of the Cyrus scandal. The company isn't against the manipulation of a 15-year-old for profit when the profit in question is its own, derived from selling a wholesome image of Cyrus to young girls through the Hannah Montana franchise. That's why Disney was so eager to tamp down Cyrus' natural and fairly tame (if unusually public) experimentation with her own sexuality, a process well under way — and heavily photographed — on the internet before Vanity Fair's Annie Leibovitz turned her lens on the star.

But this billboard is the clearest, simplest symbol yet of how Disney's beef with Vanity Fair is about business, not morality. If this sort of thing were a moral question for the company, it would police so-called manipulation of all its child icons with equal vigor, whether the kid in question was selling 10-figure TV packages or cheap underwear sets. That clearly is not the case.