Neeraj Khemlani to run CBS News

CBS announced today that it is combining the journalism and business resources of its news operations and television stations.

The new CBS division will include the broadcast resources of CBS News, the 24/7 streaming news service CBSN, ten CBSN Local platforms, cbsnews.com and 28 CBS-owned stations in 17 major U.S. markets. It will serve local, U.S. and global audiences via TV, cable, satellite and digital platforms, offering news, news programs like 60 Minutes, live sports broadcasts, TV serials like Star Trek, talk shows and comedy, soap operas and other entertainment.   

The CBS News and TV stations division will be co-headed by Neeraj Khemlani and Wendy McMahon. “I’m excited for us to embrace this transformative moment…that will amplify the importance of the original reporting and storytelling at CBS News,” Khemlani said in a statement.

CBS is part of ViacomCBS, a New York based media company, with a market value of $24 billion. In addition to the news network and TV stations, media brands owned by ViacomCBS include Paramount Pictures, which produced the Godfather movies; Comedy Central and Showtime cable channels; and Nickelodeon, a children’s channel.

The weekday morning and evening programs of CBS News ranks third in audience ratings, behind NBC and ABC. Fox is the fourth major TV network in the U.S. Ratings determine what networks can charge for advertisements and how much they are paid by the cable operators who broadcast the programs. So, Khemlani and McMahon face a major challenge of lifting the ratings of CBS’s weekday programs.

Khemlani, 51 years old, was most recently deputy head at Hearst Newspapers, overseeing 3,000 employees who publish print and digital subscription products for 24 daily and 52 weekly publications including in Houston, San Francisco, San Antonio, Albany, and New Haven.

Earlier Khemlani was president of Hearst Entertainment & Syndication, responsible for cable network partnerships at ESPN and A+E Networks; digital video entertainment and music streaming businesses such as Complex Networks and Kobalt Music; video production through NorthSouth; and comics syndication and character licensing operations at King Features Syndicate.

In 2016, Verizon took a 24% equity stake in Awesomeness TV, alongside DreamWorks and Hearst at a $650 million valuation, and also agreed to create a short form mobile video service. Commenting on the deal, David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines told Commpro, “The credit goes to Neeraj Khemlani,” then co-president of Hearst’s entertainment division. In 2018, Awesomeness TV was sold to Viacom reportedly for anywhere between $25 million and well under $300 million, well under half its value two years ago. Viacom is now part of ViacomCBS, Khemlani’s new employer.

Khemlani began his career at Hearst in 2009 as special assistant to the CEO for digital media, managing the promotion and coordination of digital content transformation. Founded in 1887, Hearst “has embraced technology shifts from black-and-white printing to color printing to radio waves and broadcast waves and so on,” Khemlani told Politico in 2014. “Creating exciting new digital products is part of the natural evolution of our company,” he added. He then served as Hearst's chief creative officer.

Prior to Hearst, Khemlani was a vice president of Yahoo! News & Information. He managed the business of Yahoo! News, Tech, Weather and Education, original video productions and the editorial programming for Yahoo! Finance.  
 
From 1998 to 2006, Khemlani was a producer for CBS News’ 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes II. Prior to that, he was at ABC News, where he produced segments for Nightline, Good Morning America, Peter Jennings Reporting and ABC News Specials. He won a 2004 Emmy nomination for business reporting, a 2003 Emmy nomination for best interview, the 2002 Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting and a DuPont Award in 1995 for his participation in ABC News’ coverage of the war in Bosnia.

As a journalist and producer, Khemlani stories reportedly include gun sales in Pakistan’s northwest frontier; a three-part series with CBS news anchor Dan Rather on what Osama bin Laden and his associates were doing in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Sudan the summer before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.; interviews with Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi; musicians like the Grateful Dead; and actors like Bollywood’s Aishwarya Rai. 

Khemlani began his media career as a newspaper reporter, stringing for The New York Times and The Post-Standard in Syracuse, New York, while a student at Cornell University. He earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1993 and a bachelor’s in communications from Cornell in 1992, where he was the editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun.

Though on Twitter since 2009, Khemlani is not active having last retweeted in August 2017.

With family roots in India, Khemlani was born in Singapore and raised in New York. In 1988, he graduated from Stuyvesant High School, the top city run school in New York.  

Khemlani is married to Heather Cabot; they have twins, a son and a daughter. Cabot is the host of The New Chardonnay podcast and the author of The New Chardonnay: The Unlikely Story of How Marijuana Went Mainstream. In 2017, she co-authored Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech. She is a former anchor and correspondent for ABC News.

Following today’s news that Khemlani was to co-lead the new CBS division his wife Cabot posted on Instagram: “Could not be more proud of Neeraj Khemlani, my life partner and best friend.”

Editorial Comment: Are Indian Professionals in the U.S. proud of a minority label

Employers in America, including government agencies, colleges, hospitals, technology companies and large corporations, hire Indians to show their commitment towards meeting minority and diversity goals, including for senior management roles.

The term “minority” in this context is not a statistical measure. It is applied to various groups in the U.S. who hold few or no positions of power.

But the employers ignore that, unlike Blacks and Hispanics, Indians do not qualify as minorities. Indian professionals in the U.S. are almost all from middle-or-upper class families, who were educated at good schools and colleges in India and the U.S. Also, except for descendants of Sikh farmers who migrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century, none of them suffered any historical discrimination and economic hardships in America.

The original goal for including Asians among minorities was to help uplift the historically disadvantaged people from Hawaii, Guam, Samoa and other U.S. jurisdictions in Asia and the Pacific, descendants of nineteenth century Chinese railroad workers and Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War Two.

Indian professionals face rising criticism for taking jobs, from some minorities, White Americans as well as conservative and right-wing politicians.

In this environment, Indian professionals should tell their boards of directors and employers to exclude them from lists they compile to show their commitment to diversity hiring. This will ensure that the employers hire Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and other minorities, who legitimately qualify.  

 Also, it is in the self-interest of Indian professionals to clearly establish that their hiring was based on merit. Otherwise, their professional achievements will be doubted for the rest of their career, even as they are burdened with the label of being hired to fill minority quotas. This experience would be similar to that of minorities who meet the intent of diversity hiring. There is an underlying and often unfounded assumption among some of the other employees that such minority hires do not possess the requisite qualifications and skills.  

Most Indian professionals in America – from chief executives Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Anjali Sud at Vimeo and Sonia Syngal at Gap; Ajit Jain, vice chairman at Berkshire Hathaway; Srikant Datar, dean of the Harvard Business School; Vanita Gupta, Associate U.S. Attorney General; and on down – deserve their success given their educational credentials, training and skills. So, it should be unsettling for them to be counted and represented as evidence of ethnically diverse “minority” hiring.

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