ViacomCBS severed ties with Nick Cannon over a month ago after he made some anti-semitic remarks on his podcast. But it looks like things are taking a turn for the better after Cannon’s apology tour.
The multi-hyphenate has been using his Cannon Class platform to educate himself and really understand why his comments were wrong. President of entertainment and youth brands at ViacomCBS, Chris McCarthy, recognized these efforts and praised him during a town hall meeting with employees.
“I don’t know if anyone has been following Nick’s journey since the incident – I have, and the thing that’s unique about Nick – different from many others, is that Nick owned it. He apologized, he said it was wrong. He has since been on a journey of learning and understanding, and more importantly, he is using his voice to help educate other people and is becoming an advocate on this issue. This is consistent with the Nick I’ve known for ten years,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy didn’t detail any specific plans for Cannon to work with the company again, but he said he’s “hopeful” that they can reconnect with Nick Cannon to tell stories about important social issues.
Check out McCarthy’s full statement below:
Let me start with stating the important and hopefully obvious fact – what Nick said was wrong, hurtful, and it was offensive. We have to stand up for our values – clear and simple. Hate against one of us is hate against any of us and Nick’s comments were anti-Semitic. So, we needed to stand up to that and we did that which was the right thing to do.
I don’t know if anyone has been following Nick’s journey since the incident – I have, and the thing that’s unique about Nick – different from many others, is that Nick owned it. He apologized, he said it was wrong. He has since been on a journey of learning and understanding, and more importantly, he is using his voice to help educate other people and is becoming an advocate on this issue. This is consistent with the Nick I’ve known for ten years.
As I look back on all of this, I regret that we didn’t have our new ‘Cultural Code’ built sooner. It’s a shame that it took an incident like this for us to take a step back and have a clear process in place to address issues like this. Part of that came from when I asked myself – ‘what could we have done that would have made it better or what can we do to prevent this from happening in the future?
I struggle with the fact that Nick, a longtime partner and friend of ours, is on this journey and we’re not part of that journey. And that’s honestly where the our new ‘Cultural Code’ came from and bringing in social justice partners so we all have the base-level education. And, if I could change anything, I would have asked us to build that two years ago.
We’re in the content business and we all understand the power of telling stories. The gift that we have as storytellers is to transport audiences into new worlds and experiences – enabling them to walk in someone else’s shoes. And when we do this well, we can give the gift empathy and understanding. And we do this all the time, as we will see from the upcoming video. And we have been doing it for years, from the early days of ‘Real World,’ to ’16 and Pregnant,’ to what Trevor (Noah) does every day. We help other people understand the world we live in. And we need to step up even more.
So, when I take a step back, I am hopeful. I am hopeful we find a way to bring these two things together and hopefully we will have the opportunity to do that with Nick again.
