Scientology gets another journalist fired for daring to print the truth

Like so many other online enterprises, InsideTheMagic started as a fan website from someone who wanted to write about his obsession. Created in 2005 as a podcast by Disney fan Ricky Brigante, the website grew to become a nexus for other Disney obsessives.

Brigante sold the site in 2018, and at that point online complaints about what a clickbait-machine the site was under its new management skyrocketed.

Snopes even had to debunk several of InsideTheMagic’s misleading headlines that were written simply to increase traffic to the site, and fans complained that increasingly ITM was publishing rumor as fact.

Brian Walton, an experienced entertainment journalist and film reviewer who had been editor in chief at Nerdist, tells us that he was encouraged when ITM offered him a job, saying that under a new content manager, the site was trying to get away from the clickbait and back to the kind of solid news coverage that had won its original audience.

He was brought on as an affiliate content producer, meaning that it would be clear that his opinions were his own and not necessarily that of the website. He says he was fine with that arrangement.

So, in July, as Tom Cruise’s latest Mission Impossible hit theaters, Walton reviewed it for InsideTheMagic, and was much more unimpressed with the movie than other critics.

In a lengthy, detailed review, Walton complained that the film was a collection of set-pieces that he’d already seen too many times in other movies that summer. Were Cruise and his director, Christopher McQuarrie, really this out of ideas?

From beginning to end, the movie is a solid, big Hollywood action blockbuster that I’ve unfortunately seen too many times. The central action set pieces of the film are borderline tropes that director Christopher McQuarrie is all too happy to check off. From the first gunfight in the desert to the chaotic car chase through the streets of Rome to the final big stunt and train sequence, everything in this film gave me a sense of deja vu from something else I’ve already seen in recent memory.

Hey, InsideTheMagic wanted his opinion, and Walton was not shy about giving it.

But what got him in trouble was something else.

As he sat down to watch the film, he was first greeted with a short segment featuring Nicole Kidman thanking him for coming to the theater. (If you’ve been to the movies lately, you might have seen this yourself.)

The irony was not lost on Walton, as he explained in his review…

It’s awkward to see a film in a theater where just before the movie starts and the lights go down, the movie star’s ex-wife, who has been banned from seeing their children by his church, comes on screen and gives the pledge of the movie theater allegiance. Let’s not mistake the reality of what Cruise’s paychecks go to support within his “religion.” Your ticket purchase went to Danny Masterson’s defense fund in Scientology via the massive paychecks Tom Cruise earns on these films. So yeah, there is some moral questioning about whether or not you want to see a movie star that supports that.

Hey, he’s not wrong. But you don’t see that kind of bold truth-telling every day, and maybe particularly at a website obsessed with all things Disney.

Walton says that the morning after the review appeared — and again, it was clearly labeled as Walton’s opinion, not the website’s — he was told that Scientology’s reps (probably its spokeswoman, Karin Pouw), had been ringing up the website and were not happy.

“I wake up to find out Scientology had gone after my boss and me while I was asleep. The editors of the site called my boss in the middle of the night, not me, in a panic,” he says.

The website’s editors decided to remove the lines about Scientology from Walton’s review, and that didn’t sit well with him.

“I asked them to take it down because it was no longer my review and they proved very quickly they would cave to pressure tactics,” he says.

After standing up for himself, he says, InsideTheMagic decided it didn’t want his strong opinions after all, and cut him loose.

We emailed the head of content asking about this a couple of weeks ago, and heard nothing. But Walton says he doesn’t mind us writing about this publicly.

“InsideTheMagic is a trash fire. The only reason I even went to work there is because the content director said she was trying to change things, but that turned put to be a bunch of BS.”

Meanwhile, Scientology continues to scare the crap out of nervous editors and publishers, even though it hasn’t actually sued a media company since 1995.

When are big media companies going to stand up to this bully?

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