Murdochs Pick Ailes' Insiders To Run Fox

Despite every indication that the culture at Fox News required a thorough house-cleaning, the Murdochs announced on Friday that two Ailes’ loyalists and Fox News insiders, Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy, would be taking over the leadership of the company. Both men were management insiders at Fox and Shine is at least tangentially implicated in the abuse of Laurie Luhn, but both men apparently claim they were blissfully unaware of Ailes’ sexual harassment and intimidation. That seems pretty hard to believe because it seems increasingly clear that most of the employees at Fox felt the fear and intimidation of Ailes’ management style. The scandal has also moved beyond Fox News to 21st Century Fox because of their inability to detect the millions of dollars in hush-money payoffs that were being made to keep Ailes’ scandals under wraps. The parent company had shown the same accounting blind spot when it came to News of the World payoffs in the British phone hacking scandal and, as this is the second time, you really have to wonder whether these were willful oversights.