CBS is having trouble finding Les Moonves' successor

Vanity Fair

The CBS board had hoped to name a permanent CEO by the end of last month. Recently departed HBO CEO Richard Plepler is among the high-profile names to have turned down the CBS chief executive job -- both before and after he stepped down, reports William D. Cohan. Interim CEO Joe Ianniello would like to stay in the job permanently, but he won't get consideration since he was Moonves' hand-picked successor. "People familiar with the CEO search tell me that there are two obstacles that the top candidates in the industry seem unwilling to tackle," reports Cohan. "One is the allegedly sexist culture at CBS, which transcends Moonves and seems to have pervaded the company, if the leaks are to be believed about the audit that two white-shoe New York law firms prepared—but never delivered in written form—for the CBS board. Fixing a damaged culture can be a difficult challenge for any executive. But doing so while also divining a strategy to enable CBS to compete more effectively against its better-capitalized peers at Comcast, Disney, Apple, and Amazon, to name a few, can be downright intimidating. The second obstacle is Shari Redstone, the mercurial 64-year-old daughter of billionaire media mogul Sumner Redstone, who has literally taken control of both CBS and Viacom in the wake of her ailing father’s physical and mental incapacitation."