When you think about the most powerful woman on TV, who comes to your mind?
Oprah?
Kris Jenner?
Kris Jenner as one of the Masked Singers?
Surprisingly it’s not someone on your screen – it’s someone whose decisions determine which women you see on your screen, which shows feature them, the channels that feature those shows, the networks that show those channels, and the corporations that control those networks.
It’s Shari Redstone, President of National Amusements, a company most of you have probably never heard of. Sounds like they might run a Ferris wheel somewhere.
Shari owns 20% of this little, unknown company, and her elderly father, Sumner Redstone, owns the other 80%. Why does this matter?
National Amusements has 80% voting power stakes in CBS and Viacom. CBS is one of the “Big Three” major networks (NBC, ABC the other two) and Viacom is one of the “Big Five” cable networks (add FOX to the above list).
Viacom alone is responsible for most of the major cable channels you know and love:
Despite having such a large interest in this corporation which controls all these networks who own all these channels that show all these programs, Shari Redstone has a problem: these two large networks, CBS and Viacom, have strong competition. Individual shows go head to head with ABC hits, FOX News, and NBC primetime. But as a whole, they’re struggling: ABC is owned by Disney, and NBC by Comcast – major international conglomerates that own methods of distribution (the TV providers themselves) and content libraries (Disney, which now owns 20th Century Fox, has more and more valuable content than anyone). And that’s not to mention upstarts like Netflix with tens of millions of subscribers.
Shari had a brilliant concept: combine CBS and Viacom into a giant global media conglomerate, compete with everyone, and even the playing field.
Just one problem: no one wanted it. Not the CBS shareholders, the Viacom shareholders, not the board members of either company, not even her ailing father who separated the companies in 2006 to make each individually viable and valuable.
In 2016, Shari’s 92-year-old father, Sumner Redstone resigned as Executive Chairman of CBS, with most concerned about his ill-health and absence at earnings calls which he’d been a fixture of. His successor was named as Les Moonves, a well known CBS executive and wife of Julie Chen, host of “The Talk” and “Big Brother”. According to CBS, Shari declined the position of Executive Chairman before Moonves was tapped for the role.
However, Sumner Redstone, got around quite a bit – allegedly showering two young girlfriends with expensive gifts while typing commands into an iPad through his medical decline.
His two “companions”, Manuela Herzer and Sydney Holland, both sued after being kicked and locked out of Sumner’s lavish Beverly Park estate and closed off from his life. Their lawsuit alleged Shari wanted control of her father’s company, claiming that he was in bad shape.
Herzer’s legal team challenged Redstone’s petitions, contending that the mogul long ago lost his mental competence and that lawyers who surround him don’t really know what his wishes are. Her team tried for more than three years to get a judge to declare Redstone mentally incompetent; they did not succeed.
Both lawsuits have since been settled, and while most of terms remain confidential, the bits we know of are fascinating:
An “interpreter” present to translate Redstone’s deeply troubled speech asked the lawyer to repeat his question slowly. But before she could do so, Redstone responded: “She is—Manuela is a fucking bitch.” So began the long-awaited testimony of Redstone, who was deposed yesterday for just 18 minutes at his Beverly Hills mansion.
As his final question, O’Donnell asked Redstone if he confronted her about why he wanted her to leave his house.
Redstone said he did not. Asked “why not,” Redstone replied: “Because she’s a fucking bitch.”
Hell of a move for dad to go on record calling his ex a “fucking bitch”.
As part of the agreement, Herzer agreed to pay the Redstone family $3.25 million to reimburse Redstone for some of the gifts that she had received from him. Herzer also agreed not to sue the family again.
Even bigger move to get one of your multibillionaire dad’s sidechicks to reimburse him for the gifts.
The next target? Les Moonves, that new Chief Executive of CBS, and steadfast opponent to any kind of CBS/Viacom merger.
At CBS, the once-popular Chief Executive Leslie Moonves bristled over Shari Redstone’s control and desire to reunite CBS and Viacom. In May, CBS filed a lawsuit to strip the Redstones of their voting control of the company, but that effort collapsed in September when Moonves became mired in a sexual harassment scandal that ultimately cost him his job and a $120-million severance package.
The biggest move: hush-hush sexual harassment allegations about your chief rival to drop loudly during #MeToo.
That wasn’t all that was in the hush-hush Moonves settlement, however:
Forget about the fact that as part of the September 2018 separation agreement between CBS and Les Moonves, National Amusements had agreed not to initiate another merger between CBS and Viacom for two years. That was just a clever legal sleight of hand, or so it seems.
Two years before being able to merge the companies, right? That pushes us well into 2020, and by then who knows how much bigger Netflix or ABC can get?
Remember Shari’s last remaining hurdle – the boards of directors at CBS and Viacom?
Unlike the previous two times she pushed for a merger, however, this time Shari faces no meaningful opposition to her schemes. Moonves is gone; the old guard on CBS’s board once loyal to him has been swept away and replaced by a slate of FOSes (Friends of Shari); and the interim C.E.O. of CBS, Joe Ianniello, who presumably wants the job on a permanent basis, is unlikely to thwart Shari, which is also true of any of the senior CBS executives who are rooting for him. Meanwhile, over at Viacom, opposition to Shari has long since been silenced. Like at CBS, the board of directors of Viacom appears aligned with her way of thinking, as does the new C.E.O. Bob Bakish, who owes his unlikely elevation to the top spot at the company, in December 2016, to Shari. He won’t be uttering a peep against whatever she wants to do.
Oh but damn – what about that pesky legal agreement that says “NO MERGER FOR TWO YEARS”?
What if instead of National Amusements initiating a third merger attempt between the two companies, the boards of the two companies—whose members have nearly all been hand-picked during Shari’s recent ascent—initiated the merger discussions? Surely that subtlety wouldn’t violate the agreement between Moonves and Redstone, would it?
Fast forward from February 2019 to August 2019:
After three years of negotiations, CBS and Viacom are coming together to form a new $30 billion company, controlled by Shari Redstone and cementing her status as possibly the most influential woman in media, NBC News reported.
Shari Redstone has now created CBSViacom, Inc. – which has the largest share of the US TV audience of any other corporation or network, and is #1 in the key demographics (which is how channels calculate ratings nowadays).
So let’s catch up: Shari wanted to merger these companies to make a media giant but faced giant opposition. So, she made sure her father was declared not too incapacitated to scare away two girlfriends who wanted $50m in gifts but encouraged him to step down from his business because of his health, and declined to be named his successor. That gave her the room for a rival to be nominated, which gave her time to slowly put allies in the right spots on the board. And when that rival was #MeToo’d, she was finally able to bring together the two companies, making her fantastically wealthy – and the most powerful woman in TV.
But what does she want to do with all that power? That’s another story for another day…
