Women Can Wear Pants On Fox News Now

Other than that, not much has changed.

- Gabriel Sherman

When Rupert Murdoch left his office on a recent Monday afternoon, the 86-year-old mogul was ambushed by a BBC reporter seeking comment on the ongoing scandals at Fox News. “Nothing’s happening at Fox News, nothing,” Murdoch declared. The response was practically Trumpian in its breathtaking denial, down to Murdoch’s insistence that Fox is getting “record ratings.”

In reality, in the ten months since Murdoch fired former Fox News chief Roger Ailes after dozens of women accused Ailes of sexual harassment, the network’s parent company has spent $45 million to settle sexual-harassment claims. More than 20 minority employees are suing for racial discrimination. Megyn Kelly quit for NBC, Bill O’Reilly was fired, and co-president Bill Shine resigned under pressure. Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation of the network and have granted immunity deals to Ailes’s former lieutenants, including former CFO Mark Kranz and former PR chief Brian Lewis. And about those ratings: At 9 p.m., Fox News is losing in the key 25–54 advertising demo to Rachel Maddow at MSNBC. (Disclosure: I’m an MSNBC contributor.)

But by another measure, it’s true that not much is happening at Fox News. Many of Ailes’s top lieutenants remain, including Suzanne Scott, who enforced Ailes’s short skirt dress code; Warren Vandeveer, who installed the in-house surveillance system; and John Moody, who enacted Ailes’s right-wing news agenda. A high-level employee told me that Murdoch is adopting a policy of willful ignorance about the Ailes era and “doesn’t want to know” about the past.