#les moonves

[odinsblog]

Remember what CBS’s former CEO, Les Moonves, said about giving Trump billions in free airtime?

It’s happening all over again.

CNN is enabling Trump today, and tomorrow they’ll pretend they were always fighting against him.

If selling out America to a rapist traitor who sold secrets to Russia makes them richer, CNN does not give a single fuck.

The media is complicit.

[follow-up-news]

Paramount, the parent company of CBS, and the network’s former chief executive Leslie Moonves agreed to pay $9.75 million after a state investigation found that the network and its senior leadership had concealed accusations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Moonves and, in the case of one executive, engaged in insider trading related to the allegations.

The New York attorney general’s office said in a news release that its investigation had found that the company’s leadership knew about the allegations against Mr. Moonves and concealed them for months before they became public.

“As a publicly traded company, CBS failed its most basic duty to be honest and transparent with the public and investors,” Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement.

The attorney general’s investigation found that a captain in the Los Angeles Police Department informed a CBS employee in November 2017 that the department had received a sexual assault complaint against Mr. Moonves. The captain worked with CBS for months as the company tried to keep the complaint from being reported by the news media, the New York attorney general’s office said.

In one text message included in the attorney general’s report, the unidentified police captain told a CBS employee and Mr. Moonves’s personal lawyer that they would be the “first and only point of contact” regarding the investigation. The message also said an investigating officer would “admonish” an accuser not to speak with reporters.

In June 2018, CBS authorized Gil Schwartz, then CBS’s chief communications officer, to sell millions of dollars’ worth of the company’s stock, according to the attorney general’s investigation. Ms. James said the action constituted insider trading because Mr. Schwartz had known about the accusations against Mr. Moonves, which could potentially sink the company’s stock price.

[meandmybigmouth]

Where’s the mandatory prison time for all involved? Where? Oops” forgot that old rich white proverb “ Prison for thee, But, Not for me”!

[filosofablogger]

There's Method To This Madness ...

Have you found it difficult to concentrate lately, had periods where you just wanted to shut out the political carnage and breathe normally?  I call it ‘mind bounce’ when my head goes in 15 directions at one time and I cannot seem to focus on a single topic for more than 30 seconds!  I don’t want to read or write or even hear about Donald Trump!  I would pay money for a week without hearing his…

[juniaships]

I have a love hate relationship with justin timberlake on one hand he don't be doing nothing and he is a talented singer and he voicer three of my favorite characters. On the other hand as a britney and jackson loyalist i still dislike how he didn't speak up for them when he should have.

Though, les moons-women deserves the brunt of my hatred cuz i know that cracker would've ruined jt's career too.

[rubylioness]

Just A Little While x Green Light

[navree]

one thing i will always commend the criminal minds writers for is that, during that whole mess with paget and aj, they really used the script to just beat cbs over the head with how much they sucked. aj's departure episode had a lot of that, since it was literally just "the suits are yanking jj away from the team even tho everyone wants her to stay and she wants to stay for their own arbitrary reasons", but paget's last ep in season 7 having emily talk about how coming back didn't change everything that happened before and she doesn't feel she can just fit back into the role she had when so much happened that took her out of it has that similar vein, and it works both times really well.

[europahoynews]

Ahora, durante dos años seguidos, Leah Remini apoya a Les Moonves en desgracia a expensas de las mujeres

Cuando Les Moonves renunció en desgracia de CBS después del abuso sexual en serie, la mayor parte de Hollywood le dio la espalda, no queriendo ser asociado con este tipo de conducta, conducta que parece sorprendentemente fuera de lugar hoy en día. Leah Remini abraza a Les Moonves en una foto que publicó con orgullo en Instagram el 22 de julio de 2021, tres años después de que Les Moonves…

[blanketingg]

well i think auntie julie chenbot needs to remove her romantic feelings for les moonves from the game

[odinsblog]

This is the homophobic racist CNN had hosting their Donald Trump “Town Hall”

When I said before that I would not be giving CNN any views, I meant that. CNN is hiring white supremacists and calling them journalists.

I understand that the saying, “we are living in perilous times” might seem overused, but goddamnit, we have a racist, traitorous, former occupant of the White House—LOL, I’ll never call him president—who stacked the Supreme Court with Federalist Society nut jobs, and fomented an insurrection, and very likely sold or freely gave national secrets to Vladimir Putin, and all Chris Licht & CNN sees are dollar signs, just like Les Moonves did.

Conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians find hate and cruelty toward marginalized groups amusing.

For those who don’t know, the Daily Caller is a white nationalist-lite publication, founded by Tucker Carlson, that right wingers love to read. Apparently that was Kaitlan’s only previous “job” experience before CNN hired her.

This is not new. Look at Elon Musk and Twitter. Every time some rich old white guy lies and says they want their outlet to have “more balanced viewpoints,” they almost always mean they want it to have more racists to have more freedom of hate speech. Now Chris Licht is running the same okie doke.

Trash ass media outlet.

👉🏿 https://dailycaller.com/2015/11/18/13-syrian-refugees-wed-take-immediately-photos/

👉🏿 https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/kaitlan-collins-joins-cnn-from-the-daily-caller/332413/

[kp777]

by Tim Karr

Common Dreams

Nov. 16, 2023

Democracy suffers when a commercial media system showcases fascist demagogues for profit.

There is no bottom for MAGA’s top man. At a speech delivered on Veterans Day, Donald Trump used rhetoric nearly identical to that used by Adolf Hitler 80 years earlier.

Rather than honoring veterans as one might expect of a political speech on this day, Trump used the occasion to label his adversaries “vermin” — promising that, if elected, he would use his power to “root out” all his political enemies.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake found the parallels: Hitler frequently used vermin references to justify the murder of Jews and others across Europe, while “Trump has used it more broadly to suggest that his opponents are subhuman” and deserve punishment.

Without calling themselves to account for the damage they've done, media executives will never quit their Trump habit

Parroting Hitler should not be considered normal behavior in any election cycle. But the media have grown used to covering Trump’s extremism as if it’s standard political fare. This time, though, some journalists rightly saw his Veterans Day speech as very dangerous.

“It’s important to emphasize that Trump’s rhetorical excesses are not new. To know anything about the Republican is to know that he, on a nearly daily basis, finds new and needlessly provocative ways to shock, offend, insult, and degrade,” wrote Steve Benen for MSNBC.

What is new, however, is the growing number of reporters and commentators being more explicit in their use of the term “fascist” to describe Trump’s beliefs — and “dictatorship” to describe what his return to power would represent for the future of U.S. democracy.

The media aren’t sounding these sorts of alarms enough, according to Margaret Sullivan, who wrote about the mounting evidence that Trump is indeed a fascist. “The press generally is not doing an adequate job of communicating those realities,” she said. “Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s ‘freewheeling’ style. They blame the public’s attitudes on ‘polarization,’ as if they themselves have no role.”

Sullivan urges more members of the press to report on the dark prospect of a second Trump presidency. They should “ask voters directly whether they are comfortable with [Trump’s] plans, and report on that. Display these stories prominently, and then do it again soon,” she wrote.

The ‘F’ word

Sullivan is right, of course. The media need to report more on the rise of fascism in America, and they also need to reflect on their role in enabling this. For decades the former president has capitalized on the media’s obsessive attention to paint an alternative vision of himself — one in which he features not as a twice-impeached, criminally indicted sexual abuser who sought to overthrow a democratic election that he lost, but as a decisive and winning strongman, the only person with the power and charisma to make America great again.

Media execs have played along with Trump’s charade, aware that his tele-presence is a boon for ratings and revenues. In 2016, then-CBS CEO Les Moonves said that devoting so much airtime to then-candidate Trump “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” At the time, Moonves was praising Trump for the bumper crop of political-ad dollars brought in during the contentious 2016 election, but he was not alone.

Former media executive Jeff Zucker has arguably done more than any single person to burnish the 21st-century caricature of Donald Trump. While an executive at NBC, he greenlit The Apprentice, which remade Trump from a bankruptcy-spawning loser into a boardroom genius with impeccable business savvy.

When Trump entered the political fray in 2015, he did so with an Apprentice tailwind. Zucker, who by then had transitioned to the top job at CNN, trained the network’s cameras on his celebrity candidate while denying equal time to Trump’s Republican opponents. Ratings were also Zucker’s rationale for keeping Trump center stage in 2016.

The media chose Trump in 2016 well before most Republican voters had a chance to vote for any of the other GOP candidates in the race.

And it didn’t end there. In 2020, Mathias Döpfner, head of German media giant Axel Springer, sent a message asking the company’s executives if they wanted to “get together for an hour on the morning on Nov. 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?” Döpfner justified this question by praising the Trump administration for supporting issues, like corporate tax breaks and reining in big tech, that benefitted Axel Springer.

The profit incentive

If you’re noticing a pattern, it's this: Democracy suffers when a commercial media system showcases fascist demagogues for profit.

That seems obvious enough, but it’s worth repeating: News media companies rely on ratings and related advertising revenues to survive. In other words, the news business is about putting on a show that will draw the largest numbers of viewers. And Trump — like Hitler and Mussolini before him — is a camera-ready showman.

More important matters like correcting Trump’s many falsehoods or reporting on the troubling consequences of a second Trump presidency are secondary for those who just want to draw more attention to their primetime offerings.

Former executives, like Moonves and Zucker (who for a variety of unsavory reasons have since left their companies), and existing ones, like Döpfner, were saying that as long as Trump’s autocratic extremism makes them richer, there’s no need to worry about the consequences. Never mind that, if elected, he’d likely use his power to undermine media freedom and silence dissenting voices.

The commercial U.S. media system needs to undergo deep reckoning for accommodating the rise of Trumpism. This atonement should be reflected in a shift in the ways large outlets report on Trump, but also by recognizing the commercial incentives that drive media to lead with the Trump Show, damn the far-right repercussions.

Without calling themselves to account for the damage they've done, media executives will never quit their Trump habit — not in 2024, nor at any point after.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

[lol-jackles]

How much of a hand do you think Brad Schwartz had in the Walker cancellation? He seemed pretty insulting and arrogant in some of the interviews he gave, saying that they didn’t feel a rush to make a decision by an “arbitrary” deadline (the Upfronts), essentially leaving the cast and crew hanging in the balance (though I know there’s so much we don’t know that happened behind the scenes). And from him initially saying that “as long as it performs” and that it wasn’t a question of finances but then whining over the economics and license fee (please forgive me for not providing citations but it’s been common knowledge this he said this and I’m too mad to look anything up right now). Why would he be so disrespectful and duplicitous toward the production and the general public? I would think that wouldn’t bode well for his long-term credibility but what do I know? I know that all the moguls are hatchet men but as far as I know, even THEY don’t seem to blatantly lie so obviously to the public. Thanks, and sorry for the rant. I just hate it when people are treated so poorly. I love your blog.

I was about to yell at this Anon below for not including the sources...

And then I saw your Ask/rant, and no problem, rant rant away!

Seems that these...well, I hesitate to call them "friends" per se... felt that they, er, I mean Jared and the cast and crew were bring strung along while the PR fight between CW and CBS was being played out in the media.

I admit, it felt a little disrespectful. But it's the business side of show business. Jared knows this and professional has to display grace. But his .....how should I put it nicely..... ~acquaintances ...... don't have to and may think they're $tanding up for Jared.

As for Brad, he'll be remember in the long line of CEO with very questionable actions: former CW president Dawn Ostroff tried to kill Supernatural in its 6th season, former CBS CEO Les Moonves hated Star Trek and killed Enterprise, Angel had an infamous series finale because it was cancelled due to "power play" between Fox and WB.

[ericdeggans]

Why you should care about the TV Critics Association Press Tours, even if you are not a TV critic

Back in the day, years ago, it happened with regularity: A snarky story in one of the entertainment industry trade magazines taking a shot at the Television Critics Association’s twice-annual press tours.

Before we go on, a bit of inside baseball for context: the TCA is a group of critics and journalists who cover the TV industry, and two times a year we hold a conference of sorts in Los Angeles. Loads of major TV outlets participate, rolling out press conferences, receptions, set visits and interview opportunities to promote series and projects rolling out over the next six months or so.

The most recent TCA press tour, which I attended in Pasadena, Calif. (the picture above shows me giving the group's Heritage Award to Twin Peaks during the TCA Awards July 12), concluded in the middle of last week. And, predictable as an afternoon rain shower in Florida, The Hollywood Reporter rolled out a tough piece describing “The Incredible Shrinking Press Tour.”

“Frustrations with a staid press conference format, accelerated by Hollywood belt-tightening and the COVID-era shift away from in-person gatherings, to say nothing of severe budget cuts across the media landscape, have taken a visible toll on the press tour,” read the story, which quoted unnamed publicists of TV programmers sniping about having to participate. “An event that once stretched more than two packed weeks wrapped its latest cycle on July 17 after a thin eight days. Powerhouse streamers such as Netflix, Apple and Amazon were absent, and not a single programming executive took the stage to face down the press.”

(cast of Brooklyn Nine Nine at a TCA set visit)

True enough, this year’s press tour was smaller than previous outings; the event has struggled to return after COVID sidelined much of the TV industry. But Hollywood has also been buffeted by the impact of two strikes last year and concern – so far averted – that there might be a third this year.

A surplus of TV programming, increased production costs and caution about this year’s climate has led some big projects to be delayed until next year – more than one person in the industry joked to me about the phrase many are repeating in Hollywood, hoping to “survive until 2025.” Downsizing in media has also made it tougher for journalists to find the time and financial resources to attend press conferences at a swanky hotel which stretch out over more than a week.

Turns out, there’s lots of reasons why the tour has slimmed down this year, as the industry itself recalibrates and refocuses amid lots of institutional change.

But, as someone who has attended TCA tours since 1997 – yes, I’m THAT old -- I’m here to say that the tour remains a relevant and useful part of covering the industry, despite the anonymous sniping of assorted industry types.

(Yours truly visiting The Price is Right set during a TCA tour.)

When I first began attending tour, as the TV critic for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, the event was filled with critics like me from regional papers from across the country. We were trying to give our local readers insight into an industry which came into their living rooms nightly for hours at time. And for me, the TCA tour was an invaluable crash course in modern television.

Over the years, I got to know publicists who arranged exclusive visits to the sets of ER, Six Feet Under, Sex and The City and Law & Order. I quizzed industry leaders at on the record receptions, including former CBS head Les Moonves, Fox News founder Roger Ailes, Survivor and The Apprentice executive producer Mark Burnett, FX head John Landgraf and Scandal/Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes.

When the late, lamented UPN network created a sitcom that felt a bit too close to being a veiled comedy about slavery – the show was called The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, look it up – I was there to challenge the network’s executives and its producers. When Ailes and the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace tried to deny the way the cable newschannel favored conservatives, I was there, again, with access I would never have gotten any other way.

Most recently, in February, I asked producers from The Bachelor franchise why the show has struggled to handle racial issues – leading to losing its longtime host Chris Harrison and, possibly, the show’s creator Mike Fleiss. Their eight seconds of silence before a roomful of TV critics spoke volumes and sparked headlines nationwide.

There are few other major industries in America where the people who run things are expected to regularly face a group of journalists asking questions, sometimes pointed, about the decisions they have made. Given that media is occupying an increasing portion of our lives, having a forum where the press can interrogate the work of newscasters, documentarians, reality TV producers, media executives, series showrunners and big stars in public is incredibly valuable – both to journalists and the general public.

(former ABC entertainment president Jamie Tarses faced tough questions from reporters at TCA in 1997.)

The TCA tour has drawn lots of barbs over the years, from complaints from TV outlets about how much it costs to present press conferences, receptions and special events, to criticisms about the value of promotional items given to critics (that’s been severely toned down from the time, decade ago, when one network handed me a free cellphone after a press conference. I handed it back, noting it was far too valuable a gift to accept.)

But, as a former TCA board member from many years ago, I think what really rankles some in the TV industry is how little control they have over what happens at tours. Despite loads of coaching from experienced publicists, it is tough to predict what questions will be asked during a 40-minute press session, and an off-the-mark response can resonate for a while (Besides The Bachelor producers, I remember stars like Roseanne Barr, Katherine Heigl and even Donald Trump earning lots of critical coverage from bad press tour appearances.)

Entertainment trade publications have also often cast shade on the press tour, which regularly invites legions of less powerful and more removed journalists into the kind of access they usually enjoy.

What keeps the tour going, beyond its value to TCA members, is the ever-increasing need for publicity to punch through a media environment filled with more noise, distraction and competition than ever. Those who make TV need more ways to reach consumers, and the TCA tours still offer programmers the opportunity to reach journalists who connect with millions of consumers every day.

If the TCA press tours go away, what will be left is overly stage-managed press conferences wholly controlled by the TV outlets, with access severely limited to journalists and critics in big cities like New York and Los Angeles.

I hope that doesn’t happen. Because my time at the TCA has been among the most rewarding experiences in a long career, offering a window into the TV industry that is unparalleled and always enlightening.

[isagrimorie]

I've been rewatching The Inside -- I think people who like Criminal Minds would also like The Inside and would offer some insight into why Rachel Nichols was hired to (briefly) replace AJ Cook in season 6.

(Criminal Minds season 6 was a mess with all the network interference. It sucked what Les Moonves/CBS did to Paget Brewster, AJ Cook, and Rachel Nichols.)

The Inside premiered during the same time as Criminal Minds but since it was airing on FOX -- it was canceled after only airing 7 out of 13 episodes. I honestly don't get it but FOX was known for canceling shows out of nowhere, just because.

The writer's room comprises mostly Whedon alums - Tim Minear, Jane Espenson, David Fury, and Ben Edlund, with Howard Gordon. The writing is pretty deft in combining character stories with cases of the week. It's the number one frustration I have with Criminal Minds.

The thing that Criminal Minds has over The Inside though -- is the compassion it has for the victims -- in that, the victims sometimes have more of a fighting chance of surviving or getting justice.

Also, 100% the Criminal Minds team is the more mentally healthy team than the VCU team.

The main reason why the BAU Team is a lot more better off -- despite how grueling things have become is because of the people who lead them.

The VCU Team, however, has Virgil Webster.

"Officially, we're part of the Bureau's Violent Crimes Section - in reality, we work for Web. While we have the full resources of the L.A. field office, we're semi-autonomous, by which I mean completely independent. We take the cases Web chooses, and we pursue them to his satisfaction, which may or may not be completion. He gets bored sometimes . . . Web picks people for one reason: they have something he needs." - Special Agent Paul Ryan

The Inside ostensibly has six members but the most important in terms of narrative is limited to three.

Web, Paul, and Rebecca Lock (Rachel Nichols).

And Web is the man who pulls all the strings -- unlike the BAU where they have a roundtable and a case is already chosen, Web 'encourages' the VCU to convince him about the cases they will pursue.

Web is like a more diabolical Dr Gregory House. Web only cares for a case if it interests him. If it doesn't he moves on.

It's highly implied in the show that Web is a Villain Protagonist -- that the only reason why he's not a serial killer himself is because he's decided to become someone who hunts serial killers.

There was an entire episode where the Team could have gotten out from under Web's shadow but Paul actively maneuvers a way to get Web back into the fold.

Melanie and Danny asked why he did that and Paul and Rebecca basically say:

Paul would rather suffer mental anxiety of being under Web’s thumb than let Web wander around, “loose”.

It's absolutely Buck. Wild. the VCU team accepts their boss would be a serial killer if he wasn't in the FBI hunting other psychopaths.

And, of course, there's Rebecca Lock, the lever that forms the messed up triangle that is the VCU power structure.

Web wants to mold her into his own idea of a perfect crimefighter -- Dexter but in reverse.

The premise of the Pilot, the former profiler of the VCU team was pushed too hard and took her own life, and Web immediately pounced on bringing Rebecca into the team.

Paul is the Hotch of the VCU team.

Paul attempts to be the 'good' guiding force-- the angel on Rebecca’s shoulder. Except he is also young. And self-righteous, for his own good but most of the time not wrong.

Rebecca Lock is... the JJ/Emily of the VCU team... so much so that Criminal Minds hired Rachel Nichols in season 6 to literally replace JJ. (Because of network interference).

But Rebecca Lock is not Ashley Seaver. Lock has a harder edge than Seaver. She's a survivor but she has (unaddressed) complex PTSD.

Rebecca has visible cracks in the foundation Web can see and willing to push to break.

He fully believes in the quote: “Beautiful in the broken places.”

Because to him- he would be the one to mold Rebecca. Or think he does.

Paul thinks he’s helping. But they’re both wrong.

My hope, if the show had continued on Rebecca would tell both Web and Paul to fuck off because she doesn't need nor want to be molded into their idea of a Perfect Agent.

There's also Melody Sim who does Forensic work, Danny Love who does most of the tactical stuff, and Carter, their Technical Analyst.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to know more about them.

This is a fascinating show with a fantastic writer’s room— a veritable who’s who of a Whedon show: Tim Minear, Jane Espenson, David Fury, ans Ben Edlund.

But it was on Fox and went against, of all things— Dancing with the Stars, and within 7 episodes, Fox canceled the show. The rest were aired in the UK.

All 13 episodes are on YouTube

[1americanconservative]

Ryan Fournier

@RyanAFournier

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In case you didn’t know, E Jean Carroll has accused many men of raping or sexually assaulting her… Including a babysitter’s boyfriend, a dentist, a camp counselor, an unnamed college date, an unnamed boss and CBS chief executive Les Moonves

- Per The National Pulse This is why she’s not credible.

The woman who just won $83.3 million from Donald Trump in court:

-named her dog “Tits” & “Vagina”

-told Anderson Cooper that rape is “sexy”

-lives in a cabin in the woods called the “Mouse House”

-paints trees and rocks blue

-lined up her entire allegation with the plot of an SVU episode

-called sluts “sexual geniuses”

-tweeted about learning sex tips from her dog Trump didn’t defame E. Jean Carroll, he just told the truth

— she’s batshit crazy.

The court ruled that Donald Trump is not guilty of rape in the case of E. Jean Carroll.

Yet, the same court still ordered Trump to pay the lunatic woman $83.3 million.

Another example of how the government has been weaponized against Donald Trump in attempt to ruin the man.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

However, the choice of Greene as a guest instantly recalls the comments of then-CBS CEO Les Moonves during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign when he admitted that Trump’s candidacy “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Moonves added, “The money’s rolling in and this is fun. … (T)his is going to be a very good year for us,” concluding, “Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”