He is seen in the newsroom as embodying a typical Fox News viewer: an Irish-Catholic family man, son of a New York City police officer. His wife is the author of “Happy Housewives,” an ode to female empowerment through 1950s-style domesticity.
.. Mr. Shine is emphatically a member of the network’s old guard, with a reputation as a corporate survivor and an assiduous flatterer. Some at Fox wondered if he would be kept on after his name, along with those of other executives, surfaced in recent accounts by two women who accused Mr. Ailes of harassment.
.. In news meetings, Mr. Shine is known less for voicing strident political views than for suggesting segments that prove popular with viewers, like stories about the gas tax.
.. When Liz Claman, a Fox Business anchor, complained to Mr. Shine last year about what she viewed as too much politics in the coverage, Mr. Shine dismissed her complaint by noting that her ratings were among the lowest on the channel
.. carrot-and-stick style impressed Mr. Ailes, who often asked Mr. Shine to handle an upset anchor.
.. Ms. Shine’s book, published in 2005 by Judith Regan, then an executive at Fox News’s parent company, was a response to the series “Desperate Housewives.” The book urged women to “shut up, stop whining, and for goodness’ sake, stop nagging your husband.”
.. His wife, on her blog, occasionally delves into politics, writing last month, “I am afraid of our debt, afraid for my children, afraid we have lost the American Dream.” She has also described her concerns about the health effects of vaccinations.
Jake Tapper asked whether Sarah Palin was harassed at Fox News. She didn’t exactly say no.
In a cagey interview on CNN on Thursday, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin declined to give a direct answer when anchor Jake Tapper asked whether she witnessed or experienced sexual harassment when she was a Fox News contributor.
TAPPER: Did you ever witness or experience, God forbid, anything like that at Fox?
PALIN: I wouldn’t put up with anything that would be perceived as intimidating or harassing.
TAPPER: But you said you’re “former,” so was that part of the reason you left?
PALIN: Um, you can ask them why I’m no longer at Fox. You know, I’m not going to speak for them. My contract wasn’t renewed — that is, um, that’s the line.
TAPPER: I don’t want to be a jerk, but it sounds like you experienced something.
PALIN: Um, I just, you know, it was just time to part ways and get out there in, you know, I guess a more diverse arena to express views and speak for the public, and that’s what I’ve been able to do now.
TAPPER: All right, well, I’m not going to push any farther on that.
Palin didn’t say yes, but she didn’t exactly say no, either, and she spoke generally about the need for reform at Fox News.
“Corporate culture there obviously has to change,” Palin said. “Women don’t deserve it. They should not ever have to put up with any kind of intimidating workspace.”
The attitudes about women that doomed O’Reilly hid in plain sight for years
When I went on his show, he chastised me for being a victim of sexual assault.
.. And the dismissive way O’Reilly dealt with my own history as a victim of assault made the allegations that finally pushed Fox News to fire him this week feel all too familiar.
.. O’Reilly challenged me about the fact that I decided to go meet this person I didn’t know. He then insisted that at 13, I should have known better than go meet someone
.. he told me I made a huge mistake and appeared to suggest that I deserved to become a victim of sexual assault because I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t have done.
.. in O’Reilly’s mind, meeting a stranger off the Internet who you think is your friend at 13 is a mistake. But sexually harassing your staff as an adult is just fine.
.. how many people watched the night I was on, who saw that in the “no-spin zone,” it was acceptable to blame the victim. I can only wonder how many other victims he blamed when they appeared on his show. (He did it often enough that it became a frequent trope for his critics.)
.. I never said anything to him, because I believed that his hubris and karma would settle the score.
.. at its peak, was earning $178 million.
.. O’Reilly’s bosses only cared when his behavior cost their bottom line
Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News career comes to a swift end amid growing sexual harassment claims
“Over the past 20 years at Fox News, I have been extremely proud to launch and lead one of the most successful news programs in history, which has consistently informed and entertained millions of Americans and significantly contributed to building Fox into the dominant news network in television,” he said. “It is tremendously disheartening that we part ways due to completely unfounded claims.
.. The company and O’Reilly paid out $15 million in exchange for his accusers’ silence.
.. But the prospect that his accusers — bound by non-disclosure agreements as a result of their settlements — wouldn’t speak in anything but general terms led the company to believe it could weather the Times story.
.. In fact, it was a sixth accuser — a former guest on O’Reilly’s program named Wendy Walsh — who may have been the key to his unraveling. Unlike the women who received settlements for their complaints, Walsh never sued or settled with O’Reilly, leaving her free to speak in public about her allegations. She did so repeatedly, putting a name, face and voice to the allegations in media accounts.
.. On Tuesday, another woman came forward, anonymously, to complain that she had been harrassed with racial and sexual comment by O’Reilly in 2008.
.. The network, however, continued to roll in record ratings, driven in part by viewer interest in Donald Trump, a longtime friend of Ailes, Murdoch and O’Reilly and a frequent interview guest on Fox programs ..
.. “The O’Reilly Factor” has been the network’s flagship show for nearly 20 years, and in many ways has embodied its conservative-oriented spirit.
.. drew an average of 4 million viewers each night during the first three months of the year, the most ever for a cable-news program.
.. intense media coverage surrounding O’Reilly led to a stampede of advertisers away from O’Reilly’s program, leaving it almost without sponsorship over the past two weeks.
.. The O’Reilly controversy has been casting a shadow over 21st Century’s $14 billion bid to win the British government’s approval to buy Sky TV, the British satellite service. Leaving O’Reilly in place would likely have been a public-relations nightmare
.. The Murdoch family abandoned a 2011 offer for Sky amid another scandal, the phone-hacking conspiracy perpetrated by employees of the Murdoch-owned News of the World tabloid in London.
.. Since the Ailes scandal erupted, the company has continued to employ almost all of the senior managers who were in charge when Ailes was allegedly harassing employees, including Bill Shine, currently Fox’s co-president. Shine was accused of enabling Ailes’s retaliatory efforts against an accuser, Fox contributor Julie Roginsky