Les Moonves, the CEO and chair of CBS, has officially stepped down from his post. His departure comes six weeks after Ronan Farrow wrote his first exposé accusing Moonves of sexual harassment, and hours after Farrow’s second exposé was published. But the length of time that has elapsed between the initial accusations and measurable action marks a major change from the height of the #MeToo movement last fall. When Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual harassment in October, the professional consequences were swift and explosive. Weinstein — a former kingmaker, a Hollywood mega-producer known for his ability to deliver an Oscar winner — quickly announced that he’d be taking a leave of absence from his namesake company, and he was fired from the Weinstein Company within three days of the first New York Times article about him. Moonves, however, remained at his post for more than a month while under independent investigation. Reportedly, he was set to receive an exit package of $100 million in stock options. That exit package is no longer guaranteed — in the wake of Farrow’s second article, CBS has announced that it will withhold Moonves’s exit package if its investigation finds that Moonves violated company policy, and it will deduct $20 million from any severance package he may be owed to donate to organizations that support the #MeToo movement and workplace equality for women. But for quite awhile there, Moonves was in a good position to make a dignified and well-compensated exit from his position of power. There are any number of reasons that Moonves might have been able to sustain his position and clout in the wake of the accusations against him, but three stand out. 1) Weinstein’s power was fading when he was fired. Moonves was still at the top of his game. When the Weinstein accusations first surfaced in October, a consistent part of the narrative was that Weinstein was vulnerable to being taken down in 2017, when it had been years since he last produced a major hit, in a way that he wouldn’t have been when he was still consistently delivering Oscar winners. “If this happened during the 1996-to-2010 era, I don’t know that the effect would be the same, in his prime and his heyday,” Elaine Lui said at the time. Moonves, in contrast, was in his prime and his heyday when the first New Yorker exposé hit. He was the CEO of CBS, America’s most-watched network for 10 years running. Weinstein may have been the most powerful man in movies a decade ago, but Moonves was arguably the most powerful man in television six weeks ago. That made him harder to displace than Weinstein was. 2) The accusations against Weinstein grabbed the public’s attention because they came from major household names. The women accusing Moonves are less famous. When the Weinstein accusations first broke, the stories about him all led with Ashley Judd’s name: She was a famous movie star, and she was lending the weight and credibility of her fame to the story about Weinstein. Within days, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie also shared accounts of being harassed by Weinstein. The women speaking out against Weinstein were major stars, and that made the public care about them. The most famous woman to speak out against Moonves in either of Farrow’s articles is the character actress Illeana Douglas, best known for her role on Six Feet Under, for which she was nominated for an Emmy. What reportedly happened to Douglas is every bit as horrifying and upsetting as what happened to the most famous of the women accusing Weinstein, but there is a notable difference in the quality of attention the public is giving her story. There’s an uneasy sense that because she is less famous, her pain and her trauma are less interesting and less valuable. One unfortunate element of the #MeToo era that’s become clear in the months following the first wave of reporting on Weinstein is that the public’s interest in these stories of sexual abuse from powerful men is not guaranteed: It’s conditional. Powerful men abusing their authority is the status quo in our culture, and it takes a lot of energy to push back against that status quo. Nearly a year on from the Weinstein story, that energy may be waning. 3) People are tired of thinking about sexual assault and harassment It’s been almost a year since the first accusations against Harvey Weinstein were published, which means that we’ve had almost a year-long news cycle full of exposés accusing powerful people — mostly men — of sexual misconduct. The cycle feels endless and relentless and exhausting, and its stories have begun to attract noticeably less attention and energy as time goes on. It may be that now that the Les Moonves story is here, the public is too sick of thinking about sexual misconduct to work up the energy to care all that much about all the things he reportedly did. What all of this means is that the response to the Moonves story is comparatively more muted than it might have been had the accusations against him come out 10 months ago. So when consequences come for him, they aren’t coming with the urgency that surrounded the firing and trial of Harvey Weinstein. Update: This article was originally published on August 3rd, 2018. It has been updated with news of Moonves’s departure from CBS.<doc-sep>Shares of CBS Corp. began to climb back upwards Tuesday, but Wall Street still believes a bizarre soap opera engulfing the company’s legendary CEO threatens to drag them down. CBS’ board of directors on Monday decided to keep Leslie Moonves, the company’s executive chairman and CEO, in place even as it took steps to investigate allegations that he forced unwanted sexual contact on six different women who made details about their encounters with him known to The New Yorker. Moonves in a statement to the magazine that “I recognize that there were times decades ago when I may have made some women uncomfortable by making advances. Those were mistakes, and I regret them immensely.” Keeping Moonves in place may only delay some very tough decisions for CBS, analysts believe. “This is a cloud,” said Tuna Amobi, a media-industry analyst for CFRA Research, noting that CBS has also opened an investigation at CBS News to examine allegations of harassment and workplace culture. “I think it’s fair to say that investors want this to go away, but that’s not how these things get resolved.” Shares of CBS in Tuesday-afternoon trading rose 2.38%, or $1.22 per share, on higher than average volume of 8,733,950. The board has expressed faith in the current CBS management team, and many analysts concur that Moonves and his senior executives have generated a lot of value over the years. But some fear the allegations, part of a broader “MeToo” movement that has sought to redress many past harassment incidents and resulted in the ouster of senior media figures including Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, may make Moonves’ position at CBS untenable. “The company will not be viewed by many key industry participants as taking workplace safety seriously without significant action, which we think the Board will realize has commercial consequences, if not legal and moral ones,” said Brian Wieser, a media analyst with Pivotal Research in a Tuesday note to clients. “Consequently, it seems likely to us that CEO Les Moonves will be eventually removed from his role.” Dismissed the CEO, however, will not calm the swirl around CBS. The company is in enmeshed in a bitter legal battle with its controlling shareholder, National Amusements Inc., led by Shari Redstone. CBS wants to dilute NAI’s control, the pushback to what is said to be a belief that Redstone wants to merge CBS and NAI’s other holding, Viacom, and assert more control over the direction of both corporations. The squabble has erupted at a time when many content producers are merging or combining with larger technology concerns. What’s more, CBS has delayed its annual shareholders meeting for a second time, and has not set a new date for the event. Investors will no doubt hope to glean more detail about how the CBS board will proceed by analyzing the company’s second-quarter earnings report, due out Thursday afternoon. Even at the stock’s current levels, said Amobi, “it is still trading at a modest premium to some other media companies and at a significant premium to Viacom.” CBS may be smaller than many of its rivals, but investors have been attracted to Moonves’ strategy of trimming the company’s depending on advertising revenue and increasing the cash it gets from international licensing, streaming and retransmission fees. “You’d be hard-pressed to find an investor that thinks Leslie hasn’t done a remarkable job in the past decade, but the issue at hand now is rising above the fundamental outlook for the company,” said Amobi. CBS did not respond immediately to a query asking if Moonves would be present during the company’s second-quarter conference call with analysts and investors. In the end, Moonves’ fate may well hang on the 11 independent members of the company’s board, who are said to be focused on CBS’ workplace culture as well as investigating the recent allegations against the CEO. “They need to do their own work and make a thoughtful decision,” says Laura Martin, an analyst with Needham & Co. But the board also has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders that makes it difficult to bid Moonves farewell. If the board independently confirms the New Yorker allegations, Martin says, “it likely means Shari Redstone will gain more leverage in her efforts to combine Viacom and CBS, which is sub optimal for CBS shareholders.”<doc-sep>Les Moonves' amazing track record building CBS into a media powerhouse is "totally irrelevant" in the face of sexual misconduct allegations, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Tuesday. "We know what has to happen," Cramer told "Squawk on the Street," suggesting Moonves must step down or be removed. "This is an issue of conscience. It's an issue of morality. It's an issue of life. It's not an issue of stock," Cramer contended, pointing out Moonves acknowledged in a statement responding to Friday's report by The New Yorker that he "may have made some women uncomfortable by making advances." Moonves also said in his statement: "Those were mistakes, and I regret them immensely. But I always understood and respected — and abided by the principle — that 'no' means 'no,' and I have never misused my position to harm or hinder anyone's career." Asked whether Moonves deserves "due process" before judgment is rendered, Cramer said, "It's a 'statute of morality.' That's a higher 'statute,' an easier standard." Cramer's comments were made one day after the CBS board announced its decision to seek outside counsel to investigate the allegations against the 68-year-old Moonves that date to between the 1980s and 2000s. The board, which made no decision about Moonves' role in the company, also postponed its annual shareholders meeting, which had been set for Aug. 10. The New Yorker article, published online Friday, was written by Ronan Farrow, whose investigative reporting in October contributed to the downfall of Hollywood power broker Harvey Weinstein. "All that we keep reading about is that the [CBS] board knew, the board knew, the board knew," Cramer said. If true, the board should have already been investigating the allegations, added Cramer, host of "Mad Money." CBS was not immediately available to respond to CNBC's request for comment. Shares of CBS opened higher Tuesday on Wall Street after Monday's 5 percent decline and Friday's 6 percent nosedive. The stock, as of Monday's close, was down about 13 percent for all of 2018.<doc-sep>Embattled CBS chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves has exited the Commission on Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace, which is headed up by Anita Hill, Variety has confirmed. A spokesperson for the comission told Variety that Moonves has decided to recuse himself from his position as one of the commissioners. The news comes on the same day that Moonves , who faces sexual misconduct accusations from multiple women, was suspended from the USC School of Cinematic Arts Board of Councilors. USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism also announced this morning that it not use the media center’s current title, “The Julie Chen/Leslie Moonves and CBS Media Center,” until the investigation into Moonves’ behavior has concluded. On Friday, The New Yorker published a piece by Ronan Farrow detailing the stories of six women accusing Moonves of sexual misconduct as well as threatening to ruin their careers if they ever came forward. Some of the allegations go back as far as the 1980s during the executive’s early days in television. On Monday, the CBS board held a three hour meeting on the subject, announcing when all was said and done that it was “in the process of selecting outside counsel to conduct an independent investigation.” Deadline was first to report the news.<doc-sep>
UPDATED: Shares of CBS took a sharp downturn Friday — falling more than 6% — after reports that CEO Leslie Moonves is the subject of a New Yorker exposé revealing that he has been accused of incidents of sexual harassment dating back more than two decades. The claims in the New Yorker piece, by Ronan Farrow, reportedly include incidents of unwanted touching and kissing. The CBS chief has been married to CBS personality Julie Chen since 2004. It’s not immediately known who Moonves’ accusers are. The New Yorker piece was said to be set to publish Friday. CBS stock closed down 6.1% Friday, to $54.01 per share, representing an approximately $1.4 billion loss of market value. In a statement, CBS Corp. said it would investigate any claims made against Moonves. “All allegations of personal misconduct are to be taken seriously,” CBS said in a statement. “The independent directors of CBS have committed to investigating claims that violate the company’s clear policies in that regard. Upon the conclusion of that investigation, which involves recently reported allegations that go back several decades, the board will promptly review the findings and take appropriate action.” CBS, in its statement, noted that the reported timing of the New Yorker piece “comes in the midst of the company’s very public legal dispute.” That’s a reference to the legal battle between CBS’s board and Shari Redstone, whose National Amusements (which owns a controlling stake in CBS) is attempting to force a merger between Viacom and CBS. Shari Redstone, through a spokeswoman, said she hopes for a “thorough, open and transparent” investigation into allegations against Moonves. The rep also said, “The malicious insinuation that Ms. Redstone is somehow behind the allegations of inappropriate personal behavior by Mr. Moonves or today’s reports is false and self-serving.” Amid a decline in the broader market, shares of Viacom closed up 4.6%. Separately Friday, Viacom announced the acquisition of AwesomenessTV, a digital media company that targets Gen Z audiences, at a significant discount from its prior valuation. Farrow’s in the New Yorker last October on Harvey Weinstein detailed sexual misconduct allegations against the erstwhile Hollywood titan, following an initial report by the New York Times.