Les Moonves, president of CBS Corporation, wants you to know that he’s not the enemy of the people. Also, he’s working to ensure there will be two more years of Big Bang Theory. That'll bring the show up to Season 12, with 48 new episodes. There's a Sheldon spinoff series in the works too. But believe it or not, more episodes of The Big Bang Theory have nothing to do with whether or not Moonves is an enemy of the people.
Why would the president, CEO and executive chairman of a company that owns CBS, CBS Films, The CW, Showtime, Flix, Simon & Schuster, Scribner, CBS Radio, CNET, Chowhound, GameFAQs, Gamespot, Metacritic and ZDNet, exercising an immensely disproportionate influence on the collective society that could be called the people, need to defend himself and his company by insisting “we are not the enemy of the people”?
Let’s back up for some context. Speaking at a bank’s Media, Internet and Telecom Conference (via The Hollywood Reporter), Moonves shared his excitement with the coming wave of deregulation promised by the Donald Trump administration. “Our balance sheet is strong. So looking forward, the news out of CBS is pretty positive and I'm feeling very optimistic about the world," he said. "Obviously, there is a lot of information coming out of Washington and although we are not the enemy of the people, we welcome the deregulations that are going on there."
Weird, it’s almost like he knows that further deregulation cementing five companies' total dominance over 90% of the media shaping our perspective on the world might be a bad thing. In 2012 that meant 232 media executives controlling an immense portion of the media diet of 277 million americans. Subsequent mergers have made the problems of monopoly even more acute. What is a vote worth compared to the unelected power to shape over a million perspectives per executive?
And what else can you call anti-democratic power but an enemy of the people?
