Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom (the parent company of CBS just
came out for Bush.
Of course, it's no big shock that a big time CEO is voting Republican (in fact I'd be a quite surprised to hear that he intended to vote for Kerry.)
His rationale? About what you'd expect:
[He said that]Republican values are what U.S. companies need. Speaking to some of America's and Asia's top executives gathered for Forbes magazine's annual Global CEO Conference, Mr. Redstone declared: "I look at the election from what's good for Viacom. I vote for what's good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom.
"I don't want to denigrate Kerry," he went on, "but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people. . . . But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company."
He qualifies his support of Bush by saying that he's a "liberal Democrat." I don't know if I could subjugate my own political philosophy to that of the conglomerate I run (if I ran a conglomerate), but I can certainly understand why he would. It is his duty to run the coporation as best he can so that it makes as much money as possible.
But here's the rub: such an open political agenda can't help but rub off on Redstone's subordinates, including the people who run CBS News.
And CBS is no diffrerent than any of the other remaining media in this respect. Sometimes what I think we need is some sort of publicly-funded noncomercial broadcasting organization. Many countries have them (e.g. the BBC), although such an idea is probably too close to "socialism" for many in the United States (actually, I know it is. Here in Nebraska there was stiff opposition to the creation of a public radio network in our legislature because several members thought that such a thing was tantamount to "creeping socialism." We got one anyway.).