Sputnik Radio's Loud & Clear was joined by Jodi Dean, professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, to discuss what some suspect is a cover-up by media organizations to conceal Moonves' unpunished crimes.
"The mainstream media is really preoccupied with the wealth and power of head executives. They're bewitched by it. They love it. They envy it. They aspire to it. They fully identify with it. So Moonves, for them, is like the aspiration of what they all want," Dean told Sputnik.
"So of course they are going to be completely corrupt, completely biased against women, unable to recognize the harms that Moonves and the entire CBS culture had done to women."
"One of the things that's completely obscene about this story is that it also doesn't tell you how much it's worth. He's worth about $700 million. This was before the non-severance payment… It's not like somehow he's being done an injustice. The story should be: how come he's not in jail? Because it's clear that he also destroyed evidence in order to protect his reputation," said Dean. "And how come they're not highlighting the fact that he was the center, the beating heart, of an incredible culture of sexual exploitation and violence against women at CBS for years?"
When asked why criminal charges haven't been levied against Moonves, Dean surmised that in the "big picture way, the law works for the rich and screws the poor."
"For the most part, there will be all sorts of investigations of any everyday person, or particularly a person of color, a working-class person of color or a working-class white person; if they did the slightest thing wrong then the authorities are on them; their fingers are in every aspect of their lives. But when someone is that rich, it's like the legal system is too afraid to touch them," the professor said.
"I think it's an example of the way money and power continue to work in our culture," Dean said.
In August, The New Yorker reported that the executive had sexually assaulted six women during the late 1980s and 1990s after the women had rejected his romantic overtures. Two of the women told the publication that he threatened to ruin their careers or that they had been subjected to physical intimidation. Moonves' threats wouldn't have been empty, either, as he earned a reputation in the media industry for making and breaking people's careers. While chairman and chief executive of CBS Corporation, Moonves could count Showtime and publisher Simon & Schuster among the enterprises in his portfolio, the New Yorker noted.
