At CBS, in the wake of Sunday’s company-shattering chaos, in which legendary longtime C.E.O. Les Moonves resigned after a second Ronan Farrow #MeToo exposé, the dust had hardly begun to settle when the next earthquake arrived. “Jeff Fager is leaving the company effective immediately,” CBS News president David Rhodes told employees in an e-mail sent around 1:30 on Wednesday afternoon. “Bill Owens will manage the 60 Minutes team as Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews and I begin the search for a new executive producer of the program.”
The memo continued: “This action today is not directly related to the allegations surfaced in press reports, which continue to be investigated independently. However, he violated company policy and it is our commitment to uphold those policies at every level. Joe Ianniello”—the acting C.E.O. of CBS Corporation—“is in full support of this decision and the transition to come.” It went off like a bomb inside the CBS News division, where people began reading the e-mail aloud as soon as it landed in inboxes. “Nobody’s surprised, but there’s still a shock and a sadness,” one employee told me. “Now it kicks off the, ‘What’s next?’”
Fager, the former chairman of CBS News and now also former long-running executive producer of 60 Minutes, was implicated in Farrow’s double-whammy Moonves exposés in The New Yorker. In the first, from late July, 19 current and former employees accused Fager of being complicit in harassment within the division, and six former employees alleged handsy behavior at company parties under the influence of alcohol. In the second, published on Sunday, former CBS intern Sarah Johansen recalled, “I felt a hand on my ass. The hand belonged to an arm which belonged to Jeff Fager.”
Faced with these allegations, Fager has remained defiant. “The company’s decision had nothing to do with the false allegations printed in The New Yorker,” he said in a statement distributed by his crisis-communications team. “Instead, they terminated my contract early because I sent a text message to one of our own CBS reporters demanding that she be fair in covering the story. My language was harsh and, despite the fact that journalists receive harsh demands for fairness all the time, CBS did not like it. One such note should not result in termination after 36 years, but it did.” On Wednesday evening, hours after this article was initially published, CBS News correspondent Jericka Duncan disclosed the text message in question, which Fager sent to her after she reached out for comment about the New Yorker article on Sunday. "If you repeat these false accusations without any of your own reporting to back them up you will be held responsible for harming me," he told her. "Be careful. There are people who lost their jobs trying to harm me and if you pass on these damaging claims without your own reporting to back them up that will become a serious problem."
Earlier, Fager was revealed to have retained a law firm notorious for combating #MeToo journalism after learning reporters were investigating his behavior. In both New Yorker stories, he disputed the charges against him. “It is wrong that our culture can be falsely defined by a few people with an ax to grind and not by the hundreds of women and men that have thrived, both personally and professionally, at 60 Minutes,” Fager said in the first, adding in the second, “I have encouraged everyone at 60 Minutes to speak to the lawyers reviewing our culture with the hope that our entire staff would have a voice, and the truth would come out about our workplace.”
Fager had a contingent of support internally, which one source described to me as largely generational. He cuts a massive figure within the company, and there are a lot of people who were in the trenches with him when he revitalized the news division after becoming chairman in 2011, when Rhodes was named president, reporting to Fager. (Fager returned to 60 Minutes full time in 2015.) At the same time, even to Fager’s sympathizers, the odds of him surviving the current crisis had begun to look increasingly slim in recent days. The sense was that, with Moonves gone—albeit for arguably more disturbing allegations that included forced oral sex and, as my colleague William D. Cohan reported, making a move on his doctor during a checkup 19 years ago—how could CBS permit Fager to remain and still appear serious about wiping the slate clean?
The parlor games about who might replace him at the helm of one of the most powerful franchises in TV news had already begun. What makes things tricky, sources have told me in recent weeks, is that there isn’t an obvious heir apparent to the 60 Minutes throne. In the program’s 50-year history, there have only ever been two executives at its helm: one was founder Don Hewitt, the other was Fager, Hewitt's carefully groomed successor. Owens could theoretically assume the top job on a permanent basis, but if CBS wanted to signal a real change, it might not make sense to install Fager’s No. 2. Another person whose name has come up in conversations with multiple current and former CBS employees is Susan Zirinsky, a CBS News legend and beloved figure within the division who was the inspiration for the 1987 rom-com Broadcast News. Zirinsky has been ensconced as the executive producer of 48 Hours since 1996, but sources portrayed her as an obvious possibility for the 60 Minutes job. Presumably there will be external candidates as well.
Inside Black Rock, before the details of Fager's text message emerged, there was speculation that CBS brass chose to terminate Fager for a smaller infraction not directly related to the #MeToo allegations in order to avoid dragging things out. His behavior is being investigated as part of a closely held company-wide probe being conducted jointly by the law firms Covington & Burling and Debevoise & Plimpton, but there’s no telling when that exercise is set to wrap up or whether the findings will be made public. In the meantime, as CBS journalists absorb and process the news, the one thing that seems certain is that management is keen on a reset. On Monday, as he was considering Fager’s fate, Rhodes addressed the convulsions that have rocked CBS in his weekly meeting with the news division. The change in the company’s top leadership, he suggested, according to people who were present, would allow everyone to have “a fresh start.”
This article has been updated.
