The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is planning to picket Warner Bros. Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav’s commencement speech at Boston University on May 21.
Zaslav, who is set to deliver the university’s 150th commencement address later this month, will also receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree during the ceremony.
Not everyone, however, is pleased with Zaslav, as Hollywood writers are expected to protest his speech. Nonetheless, representatives for both Warner Bros. Discovery and Boston University told TheWrap that the event will proceed as planned.
Boston University’s Instagram post announcing that Zaslav would be speaking at this year’s commencement ceremony garnered a slew of negative comments.
“Deeply disappointed in the speaker selection given the WGA strike,” the top liked comment read. “Many of my fellow alumni – and surely many of those in this year’s graduating class – are on that picket line and it’s pretty poor sport for our alma mater to feature one of the executives standing in the way of paying people fairly for their work.”
“Extremely disappointed in this move,” another Instagram user wrote. “Hundreds of your alumni have been thrown into financial and career instability because of Zaslov. We’re here, in the picketing lines, in the rain, begging for the right and dignity to get paid to do our job.”
“At the end of a year with historic campus organization and day three of the WGA strike, this is an absolute disappointment,” another top liked comment said.
“This is such a terrible decision,” another Instagram user commented. “The timing with the wga strike makes it so much worse, but why were billionaire ceos even considered at all.”
The WGA is on strike for the first time since 2007, after the writers and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were unable to agree on a deal in contract negotiations.
Recently, the WGA slammed Zaslav in an infographic that highlighted the reality that weight major Hollywood studio CEOs made a combined $773 million in 2021, with the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO having made $246.6 million.
Last week, in an interview with CNBC, Zaslav pushed back against the idea that Hollywood studios view the writers’ strike as an opportunity to cut costs.
“We’re a pure storytelling company, and we’ve been fighting to get the greatest creatives to come work at Warner Bros.,” he said. “In order to create great storytelling, we need great writers, and we need the whole industry to work together and everybody deserves to be paid fairly.”
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