CBS News Star Matt Gutman Accused Of Sexual Harassment In New Lawsuit

Matt Gutman spent years as the face of ABC News breaking-news coverage before CBS scooped him up as chief correspondent, and now a former colleague says that behind the live shots was a guy who made inappropriate sexual remarks on assignment. Samira Said isn't naming some anonymous producer nobody's heard of. She's naming a guy whose face you'd recognize from a hurricane cutaway, and she's naming Disney and ABC News right alongside him, which tells you this isn't framed as one bad actor but an institution that let it slide.

That's the part worth sitting with. Newsrooms love to cast themselves as the ones asking tough questions of everyone else, the industry that exposed Weinstein and Lauer and Rose. But when the accusation lands inside their own building, on their own assignments, the instinct is still to quietly let the guy walk to a rival network with an upgraded title. If these allegations are accurate, Gutman didn't get run out of journalism. He got promoted out of it.

We don't know yet how this lawsuit shakes out, and Gutman deserves the same process anyone else does. But the pattern is familiar enough that it shouldn't surprise anyone. Legacy media has spent a decade lecturing the country about accountability while handling its own personnel problems with a shrug and a severance check. CBS ought to be asking hard questions right now about who it just hired and what ABC knew when it let him go.