HFPA Responds to NBC Dropping 2022 Golden Globes

On Monday afternoon, in the aftermath of NBC’s decision to not air the Golden Globe Awards in 2022, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — the 78-year-old organization of SoCal-based journalists for foreign media outlets that is behind the Globes — issued a statement suggesting it will proceed with efforts to reform itself throughout the coming year, even including a timeline with bullet points of specific agenda items and goals.

The latest Golden Globes saga began after the HFPA came under the microscope in a February 21 Los Angeles Times piece which revealed that the organization counted zero Black journalists among its 87 members (now down to 86 after the April 20 expulsion of former president Philip Berk), among other demographic and ethics concerns. Time’s Up quickly launched a pressure campaign, which was amplified by numerous Hollywood A-listers via social media. The HFPA acknowledged that it needed to change in a written statement and during a brief segment on the February 28 Globes telecast, and then on March 9 announced that it had retained a diversity consultant and a law firm to conduct an internal review.

This was not enough to tamp down concern on the part of Time’s Up and representatives of some of Hollywood’s leading personal PR firms, which began emailing with each other on March 9 and scheduled a March 10 meeting on Zoom. On March 15, 104 PR firms — virtually every major one on both sides of the Atlantic, save for Sunshine Sachs, which represents the HFPA — signed on to an unprecedented missive. “We call on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to swiftly manifest profound and lasting change to eradicate the longstanding exclusionary ethos and pervasive practice of discriminatory behavior, unprofessionalism, ethical impropriety and alleged financial corruption endemic to the HFPA,” the letter read in part. “We cannot advocate for our clients to participate in HFPA events or interviews as we await your explicit plans and timeline for transformational change.” …