Les Moonves and the Familiarity Fallacy
“Les Moonves is a close friend. I’ve known him for 40 years. He is a kind, decent, and honorable man. I believe him and I believe in him.”
That was Lynda Carter, Wonder Woman herself, defending the chief executive and “programming wizard” of CBS after Ronan Farrow’s long-in-the-works expose—detailing allegations of sexual impropriety against Moonves and other powerful men at the network—was published late on Friday. Carter’s defense was echoing several others, many of them high-ranking women at CBS, including Sharon Osbourne, the CBS Sports publicist LeslieAnne Wade, and Moonves’s wife and employee, Julie Chen, who came forward this weekend to defend Moonves’s character in general and his moral decency in particular. As Jo Ann Ross, the president and chief advertising revenue officer at CBS Corp, summed it up: “My experience with him on a professional and personal basis has never had any hint of the behavior this story refers to.”
In that, the women were also echoing the defenses of the executive producer, Jeff Fager, by his prominent colleaguesThey have firsthand knowledge, the insiders remind the rest of us. They have , as it were. And so they are able to see things in a way that the rest of us are not.
