14 DAY TRIAL // Julian Assange of WikiLeaks decided that the documents stolen from Sony in last November’s hack were “public domain,” so he published them all last week online, as a searchable database. Of the celebrities to have had their feathers ruffled in the massive breach, Ben Affleck is the latest.
Rumor that he was very exacting about his public image had made the rounds before, but they were never backed by any convincing piece of evidence. Correspondence between host of PBS’ Finding Your Roots Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sony CEO Michael Lynton shows just how far Affleck would go to have complete control over his image.
His episode of Finding Your Roots, which was taped in January 2014 and aired in the fall of the same year, was edited to leave out one ancestor who had owned slaves. Gates told Lynton that he thought the request to edit out this piece of information could be explained by Affleck’s receiving bad counsel from his management.
Ben Affleck and the slave-owner ancestor
You can see a segment from Affleck’s episode in the video below, in which Affleck finds out about an ancestor that dabbled into the occult. He seems thrilled at the discovery, but he was the exact opposite of that when he was informed that another ancestor was a slave-owner.
He didn’t make any kind of objection or demand on the spot, and waited until July 2014 to contact Gates again, telling him that he wanted this part left out of the final show. Gates didn’t know what to do, because he had never censored anything on the show and he didn’t want to set a dangerous precedent.
So he contacted Lynton for advice. At first, he didn’t mention Affleck by name, but he did say he was dealing with a “megastar” and “Batman” himself. He also said that the star in question had promised to get good friend Matt Damon to appear on the show as well.
Lynton initially agreed with Gates that censorship would be in very bad form, but only if word of it got out in the media. That is to say, as long as they could control the situation and make sure no one but those involved found out about it, there was really no problem in deliberately leaving out this piece of information.
Gates replied by saying that he didn’t understand the fuss, since the slave-owner wasn’t even of the bad kind. Anderson Cooper also found out that one of his ancestors had been a slave owner, and a horrible person to boot (he was actually killed by one of his slaves), and he “didn’t miss a beat about that.”
In the end, he and PBS caved to pressure and edited out the “unsavory” bit from Affleck’s family history.
The explanation
As word of this spread online like wild fire and jokes about how Batman can command even the journalists with integrity to do something that goes against their principles, PBS issued a statement to explain the situation.
They don’t deny that they edited out this aspect of the story, but neither are they laying the blame at Affleck’s door, even though, by all means, they would be justified to do so.
Gates says in a statement to E! News that this wasn’t an instance of censorship, but rather of trimming the facts to present the most compelling story.
“It is clear from the exchange how seriously Professor Gates takes editorial integrity,” PBS adds. “He has told us that after reviewing approximately ten hours of footage for the episode, he and his producers made an independent editorial judgment to choose the most compelling narrative. The range and depth of the stories on Finding Your Roots speak for themselves.”
They’re basically doing their best to save face, now that the story is out in the open.
