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The Most Powerful Woman in the World Is a Man
The #MeToo movement may be on the verge of claiming its biggest scalp to date. On Friday, The New Yorker published allegations of misconduct against the Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer of CBS, Les Moonves.
Unlike Harvey Weinstein’s company, CBS is a publicly traded behemoth. Moonves has led CBS to huge profits, $13.7B in revenue in 2017 and healthy 4 percent increase from the previous year. People like having Moonves where he is, atop the television network with the most viewers in the nation. So it will be interesting to see where this leads. According to the article, Moonves’ egregious behavior spanned from the 1980s to the late 2000s. Perhaps he learned the lessons of the Clinton years well, lessons that the American Left is only now beginning to regret.
Which brings us to our titular subject, “The Most Powerful Woman in the World,” which, in fact, appears to be a man. Despite there being heavyweight women in the news media — reporters, anchors, editors, publishers — a list that’s long and varied, it is a man that’s truly leading this movement. And that man is Ronan Farrow.
At age 30, Farrow was in kneepants when feminist “journalists” like Nina Burleigh were strapping on their kneepads for Bill Clinton. Feminists, for all their talk of trailblazing, bravery and patting each other on the back with as many awards they could invent for themselves, have let their beliefs take a backseat to the money and their careers and have effectively outsourced one of the biggest stories of the past year to Farrow.
What remains to be seen is whether or not this is a crusade or a charade. Much of it has been driven by Donald Trump’s ascent to The White House and could easily become “the homeless crisis” of the 21st Century, ebbing and flowing from the public consciousness with the tide of party fortunes.
Published in Journalism
Perhaps it’s a crushade?
She’s got Bette Moonves eyes.
The #MeToo movement is resulting in own goal after own goal for the left.
Shari Redstone wants to merge CBS with Viacom. Viacom is owned by the company Sheri and her father Sumner own, National Amusements, which also owns 80% of the voting stock of CBS. Moonves doesn’t want that, and everybody is suing everybody. Shari says that she has nothing to do with this, and that might even be the truth, but that won’t be the way it plays out in the mini-series.
It is telling that these #MeToo victims aren’t coming forward to the feminist journalists of the last several decades. I think Farrow’s last big piece on NY AG Eric Schneiderman revealed that better than the latest article on Moonves. In that piece, those feminist pundits and journalists were actively protecting Schneiderman, as you pointed out. It’s all a neverending tragedy so far, and I’m all for letting Ronan Farrow burn it all down.
charusade (share-oo-sayd)
Part of it has to be that, for female journalists, that CBS was always a potential employer. But still, I have a hard time believing so many of these stories are unknown to anyone but the victims.
A better portmanteau!
Let the Progressives eat each other from the top down. Pass the popcorn, please, and get me a seat in the first balcony.
#MeToonves
Farrow’s bonafides on the left — this is a guy who went right from school to a six-figure salary with Hillary’s State Department, and from there to his own mid-afternoon show on MSNBC — may make liberal women within the media and pop culture more willing to open up to him than the would be if some writer for a conservative publication attempted to do the same story. And even then, NBC attempted to spike the initial Weinstein story, and would have gotten away with it if Farrow hadn’t found an alternative outlet via The New Yorker.
(And it’s also true that Farrow came to the sexual harassment story involving Weinstein with a little payback on his mind. His tenaciousness here in reporting and getting the story out involved a guy who had salvaged the career of Woody Allen, as Mirimax began financing and distributing Allen’s movies when he was about to become untouchable 25 years ago, after he dumped Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter, Soon Ye Previn. Add to that Mia’s sexual assault allegations against Allen that Ronan believes, and you had someone willing to not care if Weinstein was on the same ideological side as him when it came to reporting the story, and his later stories about sexual harassment in and around the New York media/political/pop culture world have all flowed from that.)
This is exactly what dredging up ancient 20-year old sex allegations is about. Big business is serious and takes no prisoners. Anyone can accuse you of anything with the accusations winding up on the front pages. Are the allegations true? How will this affect the ability of the accused to complete his business negotiations favorably while defending himself against very public charges having nothing to do with the current negotiations? Follow the money, and don’t believe anything you read.
It’s hard to remember that the whole point of this at first was to get Trump. It wasn’t supposed to spill over enough to take down all these other people, mostly left wing poobahs in entertainment and journalism. I pretty much expected that it would go the way it has usually gone — opprobrium for conservatives while liberals get a pass.
But what the bad vibes of the college hook up culture were telling us is what manifested in the larger culture — women got the short end of the stick in the sexual revolution, and some of them are not too happy about it. Free sex does not meet the needs of a lot of people, and some adjustments are in order.
I had known since I was a wee bairn that many left wingers treat their women horribly. I had come to believe that this was just the price those women were willing to pay for progressive politics. My impression was enforced by the silence of feminists over men of the left like the Kennedys, Bill Clinton, and Biden. So what changed?
I think, in short, that it didn’t work. The expected pay-off didn’t come. Hillary was defeated. And now we are looking at possibly a whole string of conservative justices for the Supreme Court, possibly a reversal of Roe v Wade.
Hands to yourselves, guys. It’s back to basics.
The side of the War on Women with a confirmed kill.
What changed? I’m not sure. Usually being a leftist was enough to get you a pass. Harvey thought the old rules were still in play when he said if let go, he would go after the NRA.
This may be off-base, but Clinton was smooth and charming and only raped southern trash. Why would that bother an urbane liberal? Those women with their big hair and gaudy jewelry were lucky to have Clinton assualting them.
Weinstein was rich and powerful, but he was also a mean toad who was raping starry-eyed liberal beauties. It’s not hard for me to see how conscientious progressives would find the latter bothersome and shrug at the former.