Yesterday we covered the news, revealed after the Sony hack email dump on Wikileaks, that Ben Affleck had asked the PBS show Finding Your Roots, hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to edit out segments revealing that he had a slave owning ancestor. Many of you noted that Affleck has political aspirations and that may be why he doesn’t want the negative parts of his ancestry to be made public. That could be the case, but I don’t understand that reasoning at all. We can’t help who our ancestors are. Of course Affleck could have been getting bad advice, as Gates noted in his email to Sony CEO Michael Lynton, but he chose to follow it and to strong arm PBS.

Many people have noted that this news compromises PBS’s integrity, as Gates brought up in his emails to Lynton. I listen to NPR and watch PBS and while I do think that I get much higher quality, in-depth programming from those nonprofit sources, I know they’re not unbiased. I think most people know this, and aren’t faulting PBS or Gates for giving in to Affleck’s demands. He’s a powerful Hollywood player and he dangled the carrot of getting Matt Damon on the show. PBS is not immune to pressure from Hollywood, and this story illustrates that.

Ultimately this is a much bigger PR debacle for Affleck than the non-issue of having a slave owning ancestor. It shows that he’s more concerned with covering up any and all negativity rather than being honest with the public. If he’s this controlling about a minor issue, imagine how slippery he’d be as a politician (especially if the issue at hand is Ben’s gambling or the rumors about his personal life). This speaks to his character. Anderson Cooper and and Bill Paxton (among others) were confronted with the news that they had distant slave-owning relatives, and both dealt with it head-on, as you would expect from celebrities on genealogy shows.

Here’s the segment of Finding Your Roots where Cooper is told that his fourth great grandfather was beaten to death by a slave. Anderson said the guy probably deserved it.

In contrast to Cooper, did Affleck react poorly when confronted with the news that he had a slave-owning ancestor? We’ve seen him have knee jerk reactions to issues rather than consider them thoughtfully. He is a committed philanthropist, but I do question whether he’s cut out for politics, if that’s his intention. As of now, Affleck has not responded to this issue on social media or with a statement. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and PBS issued comprehensive statements defending their editorial choice, as we covered yesterday.

Over the weekend, right around the time that the news broke that Affleck had censored his genealogy, the new teaser trailer for Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice conveniently “leaked.” Then, Warner Brothers put out the official version. It does seem like good timing to change focus from Affleck’s scandal. Yesterday, director Zach Snyder put out a new photo of the Batsuit. The official reasoning for the photo release was to thank fans for coming to IMAX theaters to screen the teaser trailer last night. (That was meant to be the first viewing of the trailer, but it “leaked” ahead of time. Slashfilm reports that Snyder added six additional seconds to the IMAX version of the trailer to thank fans.) If anything, this photo shows that the Batsuit can be worn by just about any tall, filled out actor.

Ben Affleck is shown at the Farmer’s Market on Sunday with his daughter, Seraphina, and out with his wife, Jennifer Garner, and their son, Samuel on April 7. Credit: FameFlynet