[alerter]

People will complain about political correctness, but this is just the market and intellectual property law in action.

In my experience, the ‘left’ doesn’t want the public sphere to become coddled and inoffensive. Advertisers and media companies do. It’s risk aversion.

Ideally, our shared cultural legacy would not be subject to the whims of corporate executives.

[n3storm]

I don't think advertisers and media care if you their consumers are rightist or leftist as long as they consume and the company find out what they are willing to pay for, be it weapons, "organic" food, propaganda t-shirts, survivalist stuff or magic stones.

[tsimionescu]

Advertisers and media want to appeal to as broad an audience as possible, and have always avoided anythibg with an edge, especially one they don't carefully control themselves. Recently we see these efforts to edit out the edgier parts of books as being politically correct or woke. Before something like 30-40 years ago they were seen as conservative and religious. The exact things being edited out were somewhat different, but just as much aimed at making the works more conformant to the tastes of the time.

My point being, regardless of the exact details of the zeitgeist, busy bodies editing famous works to make it "more palatable" is a constant.

[muyuu]

it's doubtful that advertisers and media would be blamed for Roald Dahl being simply a person of his era, if anything they are taking the risky position by interfering and actively censoring classic work - they risk selling nearly f*ck-all as people just stick to older editions and seek authenticity more and more