A brief history of recent accusations and consequences of sexual misconduct by media figures:
Consequences to Date: Fired by NBC
Consequences to Date: Rose dropped by CBS and show on PBS canceled.
Consequences to Date: Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media have severe all ties with Keillor. MPR canceled Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” show, ended rebroadcasts of Keillor’s decades of Prairie Home Companion radio show, and it will be renaming his old show (now hosted by musician Chris Thile) going forward.
Consequences to Date: Weinstein was fired from the company that bears his name. This also, in many ways, helped set off the recent “purge” of accused sexual harassers from news and media organizations across the United States this fall.
Consequences to Date: Fired from all positions associated with Warner Brothers Television, which produced the DC comics-inspired shows he was connected with.
Consequences to Date: Fired from Netflix series House of Cards; cut from Ridley Scott’s movie All the Money In the World with all of his scenes being reshot.
Consequences to Date: Thrush has been suspended by the New York Times.
Consequences to Date: Franken is currently serving as a US senator from Minnesota. He is facing investigation from the Senate Ethics Committee, which he has said he will cooperate with.
Consequences to Date: Halperin has been dropped as a contributor at MSNBC and NBC News, HBO has cancelled plans for a miniseries based on his book Game Change, and publisher Penguin Books has cancelled plans for an upcoming book.
Consequences to Date: Toback has denied the allegations against him, though his statements have been confusing.
Consequences to Date: Orestes resigned from NPR under pressure .
Consequences to Date: fired by Vox after admitting to the misconductSteele was in the allegations against him.
Consequences to Date: O’Reilly had at least five settlements with women who charged he mistreated them. He also had a $32 million settlement with legal analyst Lis Wiehl. After he was fired by Fox, conservative television station owner Sinclair Broadcast Group announced that it was not interested in hiring O’Reilly.
Consequences to Date: Ailes resigned from the network he founded, but remained in an advisory capacity with reportedly as much as $40 million in severance pay. Ailes died in May of 2017.
Consequences to Date: denied all of the accusations against him, though he at one point acknowledgedTrump has that a tape obtained by the television show Access Hollywood on which he admitted to a range of crude behavior was real. He is currently serving as president of the United States.
In 
Is a Wedding Cake Free Speech? Or Is That Even The Question?
On Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2017 the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
In 2012, back when marriage equality was yet to be the law of the land in the U.S., same-sex couple Charlie Craig and David Mullins traveled from Colorado to Massachusetts where they could legally be wed. They then returned to Denver where they planned on having a reception.
The couple went to Masterpiece Cakeshop to order a fancy cake. But as soon as baker Jack C. Phillips realized he was being asked to make a cake for a gay couple, he told them his Christian faith would not allow him to do so. He would happily sell them a birthday or graduation cake, but not a wedding cake.
Although Colorado did not yet have same-sex marriage, the state did have a public accommodations law that prohibited discriminating based on race, gender, religion and sexual orientation.
Phillips made a First Amendment argument that he was not discriminating against Craig and Mullins based on sexual orientation; instead, he was refusing to engage in speech by making a decorated cake that went against his religious values.
The Colorado Civil Rights Commission argued that making a cake for a customer was not an endorsement of the event the cake would be used at.
This case has generated an enormous number of opinion pieces making many arguments from many points of view. Here are several that take on the case with a range of approaches. Do not take my listing of these as an endorsement of any of them. I’m just trying to show how different people can address the same issue.
The basic news story:
And now the opinion pieces:
By George F. Will, Washington Post opinion writer
“Denver has many bakers who, not having Phillips’s scruples, would have unhesitatingly supplied the cake they desired. So, it was not necessary for Craig’s and Mullins’s satisfaction as consumers to submit Phillips to government coercion. Evidently, however, it was necessary for their satisfaction as asserters of their rights as a same-sex couple.”
By Dana Milbank, Washington Post opinion writer
“Piece of cake: If you can’t do it to racial and religious minorities, women and the disabled, you shouldn’t be able to do it to gay people.”
By Greg Weiner, associate professor of political science at Assumption College
“In Masterpiece Cakeshop , LGBT advocates can hope for a pyrrhic victory at best. Conscientious objectors to same-sex weddings may be pressed into service, but only at the long-range cost of intensifying their opposition. A vindication of religious liberty, meanwhile, would tarnish that value, however unfairly, with the taint of discrimination.
By Nathaniel Frank, director of the public policy research portal What We Know
“The reason is that the Constitution guarantees a right to equal dignity, and turning people away from public accommodations — or slicing up the public by granting individuals a license to “opt out” of the public weal — denies people that dignity. No constitutional right is entirely unrestricted, but in deciding the balance between First Amendment and equal protection claims, the courts have already distinguished between the right to hold or espouse a belief — considered “absolute” — and the right to act on it with impunity. The ‘free exercise of one’s belief,’ the courts have said, is ‘subject to regulation when religious acts require accommodation to a society.'”
Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post opinion writer
“Even if you disagree with Phillips, you have an interest in seeing him prevail. The First Amendment protects unpopular speech. Speaking out in favor of same-sex marriage was once unpopular. And views that are popular today may be unpopular in the future. To maintain a free society, we must have the freedom to disagree — and tolerance for those who disagree with us.”
And finally…
By R. Eric Thomas, playwright and staff writer at Elle.com
“I ventured up to the third floor and found a table with a surfeit of cake options, but no labels. “Do you think one of these is lemon?” a woman next to me asked. I turned to her: “There’s only one way to find out.”
She replied, “Eat them all?” My soul mate.
She asked me if I was enjoying myself. I shrugged. “Apparently, you’re invisible without a bride,” I said.
She told me she understood. She wore scrubs, with her hair tied back, a marked difference from the party-casual dress of many other attendees. She explained that she was a vet and had accidentally left her engagement ring at work. Grabbing two more slices of cake, we wandered away from the table.”