By Any Other Name

Hindsight 20/20 of course, but I'm pretty sure if I had to come up with a list of "creepy sexual harassers (and worse)" in the media, Charlie Rose and Mark Halperin would have topped the list based on guessing. I admit Lauer probably would not have made the list, not because I bought into his TV persona, but because I naively thought the contrast between that and reality would have been too hard to hide for so many years. Not that I was surprised, of course.

Incidents of sexual misconduct by Charlie Rose were far more numerous than previously known, according to a new investigation by The Washington Post, which also found three occasions over a period of 30 years in which CBS managers were warned of his conduct toward women at the network.

An additional 27 women — 14 CBS News employees and 13 who worked with him elsewhere — said Rose sexually harassed them. Concerns about Rose’s behavior were flagged to managers at the network as early as 1986 and as recently as April 2017, when Rose was co-anchor of “CBS This Morning,” according to multiple people with firsthand knowledge of the conversations.

In all 3 of cases I just mentioned, the thing I keep coming back to is... why the hell did anyone think their "brands" were so powerful and lucrative that they "deserved" to be protected? I'm not naive about power and money, I just don't get why anyone thought any of those people had such star power that they needed to keep raking in the money. This not a defense, of course, but who the hell liked late career Matt Lauer?