In discussion with Business Week Editor-in Chief Stephen J. Adler at the McGraw Hill Media Summit, CBS CEO Les Moonves said that CBS was actively pursuing acquisitions, (though not Facebook) and praised Hulu, leaving the door open to a future partnership, though not yet.

Greatest Strength: Conversion - We’re a company thats driving 60 on the freeway and has to change the tires at the same time…running these businesses at top speed, looking at digital businesses as additive. Doing the conversion while continuing to do our core business at the same time.

Greatest Weakness: It’s an easy label to say CBS is a old media company but we think nothing could be further from the truth. We are proactive with every single one of our businesses.

On The CBS Audience Network: Our philosophy is not as different from the people from Hulu, it’s different from Disney. We take our content, we want to syndicate it to as many places we can, we have something like over 200 websites, our content is available on all those sites, and we control the advertising on those sites.

We like that we’re in control… aggregation of millions of people on these sites. “now we’ve got to monetize it and that’s the name of the game.” You’re going to see Hulu do a similar thing.

On Hulu: We think it’s a terrific idea; we think we can do a better job ourself, and by the way we still might join Hulu.

On the Economy: [CBS] is advertising based, therefore the economy’s down advertising is down. As everything goes on you have to once again play the hand you’re dealt…we’re not just going to sit here.

On Ad Spending: The future of advertising obviously is growing on the internet quite a bit. The things that will hurt primarily will be print initially, radio somewhat and local stations further down. Online advertising is growing…they haven’t slowed down their TV buy…we view it as additive not subtractive.

We’re more of a mass market mass-medium so ultimately we say you want to buy for national we’ve got that you want to buy local we have billboards we have radio we have local stations…if you have a dollar to spend we can spend the whole dollar for you, we can show you how it can fit for our CBS properties without having to go elsewhere.

On Outdoor Advertising: I’m an old TV guy as you know…the amount of new ways you can advertise, by the five second spot the thirty second spot, we just concluded a deal with an auto manufacturer, from 7-9am they’ll target young working guys later on they’ll change that and target it to the soccer mom’s car, and the only thing we have to pay for that is the electricity…I’ve fallen in love with the digital billboards. The future of outdoor advertising is now very exciting.

On Possible Acquisitions: No question about it, we have a couple of billion dollars worth of cash, our capital structure is that we have reduced our dividend the past couple of years…the prices the last couple of years have been absurd.

Univision, a company that we would have liked, it would have fit what we did very well, Spanish market’s improving, it’s still a good asset run by very good guys but the price is too high. But there will be other opportunities where our balance sheet will be a great asset.

Any interest in Facebook? Not for $15 billion, it’s a pretty high price for a company that’s not a core business of ours. We’re looking at content companies, broadcast companies. We look at absolutely everything.

On Falling to No. 2 in the Ratings: We haven’t had original programming since November 20th, that’s a big chunk of time, furthermore we’ve changed our ratings system…so by definition the numbers are different, and in the meantime American Idol continues to be a phenomenon…if someone would kill that show I would really appreciate it.

On Digital Media: Better experience watching CSI on the 50 inch screen than on your computer. We think digital and online can be used for other things… the reason we bought last.fm was not for the music but for the community around it. We’re a content company so if there can be a community around music, there can be a community around sports, there can be a community around entertainment…selling adverting around it, and the record companies are ecstatic because they’re going to get paid in a new way.