For Disney’s Iger, an Unlikely Political Turn<br />Speaking on the stage of the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, he defended the decision to refrain from disciplining Ms. Hill by saying,<br />“I felt we needed to take into account what other people at ESPN were feeling at this time, and that resulted in not taking action.”<br />On gun control, after the Las Vegas massacre — in which one Disney employee was shot dead<br />and another was shot in the lung — Mr. Iger said, “In this day and age, we get outraged when an athlete doesn’t stand for the national anthem — where’s the outrage here?”<br />Then there was the presidential question, which his inquisitor, the Vanity Fair writer<br />Nick Bilton, posed while noting that he had been asked to avoid the subject.<br />Before his attacks on ESPN and the late-night crew, Mr. Trump singled out ABC News anchors for nasty criticism, calling its chief anchor George Stephanopoulos “Little George”<br />and telling the ABC News weekend anchor Tom Llamas, “You’re a sleaze.”<br />So it made for fascinating viewing when Mr. Iger showed up in Beverly Hills last week to sit for a question<br />and answer session at Vanity Fair’s annual New Establishment Summit, a two-day schmoozefest for the machers of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.<br />In September, he called the president’s decision to rescind the Obama-era program allowing the children of undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States — officially called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — “cruel and misguided.” (Adding to the sense<br />that Mr. Iger has politics on the brain, records show he switched his party registration from Democrat to no party preference last year.)<br />BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Before the Trump presidency, who could have imagined<br />that the Walt Disney Company would find itself at the fiery center of the American political debate?
