SUMNER REDSTONE DUMPING STOCK? My first thought is that this has nothing to do with RatherGate — but of course, my first thought on RatherGate was that CBS’s case couldn’t possibly be as flimsy as it looked.
On the other hand, betting on Sumner Redstone being an idiot looks to be longer odds than the same bet regarding Dan Rather.
UPDATE: A reader emails that insider knowledge couldn’t be involved:
National Review wonders if Sumner Redstone sold his stock based on “knowledge unavailable to the general public”. How could that be? Within a day or two of CBS’s promotion of the inept forgeries, anyone who was interested was well aware that CBS had – at the least – screwed up horribly. By September 14th Dan Rather and his producers were the only ones left who claimed to believe that CBS news hadn’t just driven off a cliff.
That works for me.
ANOTHER UPDATE: A less charitable take on the subject here. I still don’t think Redstone’s that dumb, and expect that this will turn out to have an innocent explanation. But this point is a good one: “Where is the Viacom board of directors, by the way? . . . Boards of directors of public companies, particularly in our Sarbanes-Oxley world, have the obligation to act like Johnson & Johnson in the Tylenol crisis, not like Arthur Andersen or Enron.” Indeed.
MORE: Professor Bainbridge thinks he knows what’s going on, and it’s not nefarious.
STILL MORE: More on the non-nefarious side, at Power Line.