Seems like Apple has been thinking differently a lot lately. It seems they don’t want to create waves the way Gandhi did. Jon Stewart’s show disappears when he wanted to talk about China and the election. And, now, Robert De Niro is accusing them of censoring his speech at the Gotham Awards.
The speech
Monday night, Robert De Niro was there to present the Gotham Historical Icon and Creator Tribute to Killers of the Flower Moon, a Martin Scorsese film. The film was distributed by Apple. It is about a the murders of the Osage people in Oklahoma after oil was discovered on their land.
According to Variety, an Apple employee had been uploaded to a teleprompter just minutes before the show went live. Passages that were removed pertained to Donald Trump and the entertainment industry.
Initially, the actor stated that there was an issue on the teleprompter. He then realized that huge parts of his actual speech were gone. So, just like me at my wedding, he pulled out his phone and began reading the original there. Before reading, he says “I just want to say one thing. The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out, and I didn’t know about it. And I want to read it.”
History isn’t history anymore. Truth is not truth. Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness. In Florida, young students are taught that slaves developed skills which can be applied for their personal benefit.
The entertainment industry isn’t immune to this festering disease. The Duke, John Wayne, famously said of Native Americans, ‘I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.’
Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and he’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution. But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature, and shows disrespect, for example, by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a slur.”
One of the missing sections of Robert De Niro’s Gotham Awards speech
De Niro was planning to thank Apple and Gotham Film & Media Institute after the speech. However, after seeing what had happened, he said “But I don’t feel like thanking them at all for what they did. How dare they do that, actually.”
Accusations
According to Variety, the changes were allegedly made based on “feedback from the filmmaking team that wanted the actor’s remarks to be centered on the movie.” They also state that Apple sent a copy of the revised copy of the speech to the teleprompter company, DeNiro had no idea any of this had taken place.
Accusations of censorship have been denied by “a source close to the film.” They are insisting that this was a miscommunication. Allegedly, there were multiple versions of the speech that were floating around. Neither Apple or the filmmakers were are that DeNiro refused those copies.
For Apple to be tight lipped about everything, how could they have bungled this?
Just so we’re clear here, they didn’t bungle anything. They knew exactly what was going on.
Source: The Verge
