Is Amazon Punishing ‘Michael Brown’ Doc (Again)? UPDATED
Filmmaker Eli Steele shares disturbing update on film upending media narratives
Amazon’s track record with conservative art is sketchy, at best.
Censorial may be a better adjective.
The mega-company yanked “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words” four years ago from its digital shelves. No warning. No explanation.
The company did so during Black History Month, making the move all the more confounding.
Amazon Boots Clarence Thomas Doc From Streaming During Black History Month https://t.co/05OE1K5BMl pic.twitter.com/L2yg7MqJlO
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) February 26, 2021
Amazon briefly censored the cover of conservative author Jack Posobiec’s book, “Bulletproof,” last year. It blocked Robby Starbuck’s right-leaning documentary “The War on Children,” restricting the number of potential voters who could see the vital film.
And, most alarmingly, it initially rejected director Eli Steele’s 2020 documentary “What Killed Michael Brown?” Amazon argued the film’s quality didn’t measure up to its standards. The claim was embarrassing given the film’s measured tone and solid craftsmanship.
A crush of media outlets cried foul on the movie’s behalf, and Amazon swiftly backpedaled.
“What Killed Michael Brown?” upends media narratives regarding the late Ferguson, Miss. resident. It suggests race hustlers turned a regrettable incident into a cry for racial justice, leaving the truth in its wake.
Turns out the company may not be done with director Steele’s film after all.
Steele says the film’s Amazon page once boasted nearly 1,500 Amazon Prime reviews with an average rating of 4.8 out of 5. That’s critical for the film’s marketing efforts and branding.
Steele told subscribers to his Substack page that he visited the film’s Amazon page in June and found only 17 reviews.
“Its hard-won credibility had been erased,” Steele wrote. The page now has 24 global user ratings, still a far cry from the original number.
It has been 10 years since Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. Shelby Steele and I made “What Killed Michael Brown?” & I am often asked what the lasting impact has been.
Answer: What happened in Ferguson split America into two & we have not recovered. https://t.co/Lk82D69wWp pic.twitter.com/eFQOqQguAo
— Eli Steele (@Hebro_Steele) August 9, 2024
He immediately reached out to Amazon’s customer service department to find out what happened and, hopefully, restore the reviews. The director supplied Amazon’s team with screen shots to back up his claim.
He was eventually told the reviews were “lost in a merger,” gone for good. Most websites have sizable backup systems to prevent such a loss, he noted. Plus, some of the remaining reviews dated back before 2023, when the merger allegedly took place.
Have other Amazon film pages suffered a similar fate? Steele explained to subscribers why this matters.
In our review-driven world, a five-year-old film with just 17 reviews lacks credibility, doomed by algorithms. Not only that, those missing reviews were my filmmaker’s resume, critical for establishing credibility and for raising funds for future projects. Amazon received 50% of every dollar that film made and it would seem that protecting the integrity of the film’s page would be a given — a trust between corporation and artist, if such a thing exists.
Steele’s films routinely challenge progressive narratives. His 2017 documentary, “How Jack Became Black,” countered Identity Politics dogma to grand effect. Steele is black, Jewish, deaf and part Native American, further confounding the Left’s racial categorizations.
Steele’s quest to challenge the status quo makes him an important filmmaking voice.
That voice, he argues, is dulled by Amazon’s actions.
It’s a battle to keep the film’s voice alive in a culture that still seeks to silence dissent. To lose those reviews is to risk losing the chorus of voices that dared to speak, to question, to stand unbowed.
UPDATE: Steele shared the latest news on the matter via his Substack account.
After three months of navigating this stalemate, two explanations emerge as the most credible. The first deals with the stark, elitist class divide in Hollywood: had this situation happened to a filmmaker with establishment clout— Michael Moore, Davis Guggenheim or Adam Sandler—the reviews would likely have been reinstated in a swift matter, focused solely on upholding the page’s integrity…
The second, more insidious possibility points to ideological discrimination, echoing Amazon’s 2020 decision to initially ban the film outright, deeming the insights of my father, Shelby Steele, incompatible with the “approved” racial narratives amplified during that hysterical, panicked summer of George Floyd. Our voices, grounded in a classical liberal critique of identity politics, were evidently not the “right kind” for Amazon to promote during the outcry for black perspectives that aligned with progressive orthodoxy.
You can read the whole account here.
Stop banning my comments. They aren’t offensive. What’s wrong with you guys?
Not sure what’s happening to your comments. I will delete death threats, censor out profanity … but opinions are all good here. I had to reconfigure the site’s comments process, so perhaps some older comments got lost in the shuffle? No matter what happened, my apologies. I’m a solopreneur and doing my best to keep things running smoothly.
Thanks, no apologies necessary. I don’t do threats or ugly language, just eager to contribute to the conversation. You publish great articles.
I’m glad you did this article. Nothing is more infuriating to me than silencing others through the use of manipulation and deception. Not a fan of Amazon.
Oh, by the way, (and you need to hear this): BANNING COMMENTS FOR NO DISCERNABLE REASON IS BAD, NOT GOOD.
Thanks for listening, let’s see if this post mysteriously survives, (since it was no more or less offensive than ANYTHING I have posted in here).
Not having the reviews would be bad enough, but to lie about it by claiming 1500 mostly favorable reviews were “lost in a merger” is simply insulting. THIS is the sort of litigation Elon could fund on the cheap. Find a really tenacious bulldog of an attorney who wants some publicity, and start to chase what happened. What data merger? who did it? when? why? what efforts were made to salvage the data? How much did views decline? How much money has Steele lost? This stinks out loud.
For the rest of us, find it, watch it, watch it again, get your friends to watch it, and everybody write reviews, lots of them.
“…regarding the late Ferguson, Miss. resident.” oops, Ferguson, MO