A new Vanity Fair profile gives an inside peek at the atmosphere inside Fox News following Roger Ailes’ death.
While many staffers cried over losing the news organization’s former chairman and CEO, who was at one point one of the most powerful man in media, many others at Fox News reportedly breathed a sigh of relief.
While Fox News is in many ways still Ailes’ network — one that some insiders say paved the way for Donald Trump’s victory — it has gone through major milestones and changes this past year. The network recently released plans for a new newsroom as ratings have lagged behind rivals in key time slots. More importantly, there has been talk of changes in the culture in the wake of high profile sexual harassment scandals.
Those changes come after Ailes’ ousting following extensive allegations of sexual harassment, including a settled lawsuit filed by Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox News anchor.
More recently, Fox News also was forced to cut ties with its star, Bill O’Reilly, after the television personality was hit with his own batch of sexual harassment allegations and lawsuits. Bill Shine, an old deputy of Ailes’s, recently resigned. While all of these changes have affected the company, the Vanity Fair profile shows why Ailes’s death has been looked as the exclamation point on the end of an era.
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