Les Moonves, chairman and CEO of the CBS Corporation, hasn’t resigned, retired or been fired nearly two weeks after a big scoop about his alleged sexual misconduct was published in The New Yorker.
That story by journalist Ronan Farrow implicated the whole of CBS’ corporate culture, with searing details like this:
Others said that [“60 Minutes” Executive Producer Jeff] Fager protected men accused of misconduct, including men who reported to him. According to several people who were told about the incident at the time, a senior producer named Vicki Gordon alleged that another senior producer, Michael Radutzky, threatened to throw furniture at her and twisted her arm behind her back, causing her to scream. (Radutzky categorically denied the allegations, saying that they were fabricated.) The sources told me that Fager said he would address the matter with Radutzky directly, and instructed Gordon not to inform the CBS office of human resources. Later, Fager asked her to apologize to Radutzky, to mitigate conflict in the office.
CBS, one former associate producer said, “is an old network. Everything in there feels old: the people, the furniture, the culture, the mores.” Many of the women described the atmosphere at CBS News specifically as a “frat house.” One former employee said, “I had several producers and editors over the age of sixty who would greet me by kissing me on the mouth. I had people touch my butt a couple times.” She added, “Fager seemed to encourage that climate. It wasn’t even that he turned a blind eye toward it.” Katie Couric, who was an anchor at the network and a contributing correspondent for “60 Minutes” from 2006 to 2011, when Fager helped force her out, told me that it “felt like a boys’ club, where a number of talented women seemed to be marginalized and undervalued.”
In the early months of the #MeToo movement, Moonves’ ability to survive such a scandal might have seemed shocking. For example, Esquire recently examined NBC’s initial efforts to deal with the fallout after allegations about Matt Lauer, former host of the network’s “Today” show, became public.
Damage control was everything. One of the first steps the company took was to sever all ties with Lauer and scrub from its websites any promotional materials featuring the former Today host. “That was all they cared about,” one source who’s still on the digital team recalls. “No one for one second thought to ask us how we were doing.”
Could the difference between how allegations against Lauer and Moonves were handled show cracks in the momentum behind #MeToo? And are we seeing evidence that a kind of #MeToo playbook is forming as companies get wise to handling accusations of sexual misconduct?
We look at what has — and hasn’t — changed about workplace culture since the start of the #MeToo movement and what effective change looks like.
Produced by Danielle Knight. Text by Gabrielle Healy.
GUESTS
Debra Katz, Civil rights lawyer and founding partner, Katz, Marshall & Banks, LLP; @DebraKatzKMB
Victoria Lipnic, Acting chair, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; co-author of the 2016 EEOC Report of the Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace Find the full EEOC report here.
Johnny Taylor Jr., CEO and President, Society for Human Resource Management; @johnnyctaylorjr
For more, visit https://the1a.org.
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