21 Century Fox has confirmed the departure of Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network chairman Roger Ailes.
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Fox News parent 21st Century Fox Inc. announced Mr. Ailes’s resignation in a statement Thursday and said 21st Century Fox Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch would take on the role of Fox News chairman and acting CEO. He will continue to make himself available as an adviser to Murdoch on an interim basis, the two people said, although he will not be directly involved with Fox News or 21st Century Fox.
It was a stunning fall for one of the most powerful people in the media industry, who built Fox News into a ratings juggernaut and a hugely influential platform for Republican politics.
“Rupert Murdoch is a conservative, but the Republican intensity, the conservative passion including the viciousness toward the Democrats that we now see against Hillary Clinton and has been going on against Obama all these years, all that is Roger Ailes, ” Paul Levinson, communications professor at Fordham University, told the AP news agency.
“Roger Ailes has made a remarkable contribution to our company and our country”, Murdoch said in a statement.
Gretchen Carlson, the former news reader at Fox had alleged that Ailes had hounded him out of the company after she refused to entertain his sexual advances. As part of the agreement, Ailes can not start a competitor to Fox News. Fox News has a relatively old audience – most of its prime-time viewers are over 65 years old.
Carlson is blaming Alies for making advances at her while she was with Fox. “I admire him professionally”, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said in an email.
Trump tweeted on Thursday, “Roger Ailes just called”.
Carlson, who worked for the network for 11 years, alleges that he proposed having a sexual relationship with her and he instructed her to turn around in his office so he could look at her backside.
Pressure mounted when other women came forward in media reports with similar claims against Mr. Ailes.
Critics said Ailes pushed a Republican agenda under the oft-repeated slogan “Fair and Balanced”.
50 anchors said they would leave if Ailes was forced out, but they didn’t say what they would do if Ailes resigned.
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The resignation comes as Fox News, known for a lineup of politically conservative commentators including best-selling author Bill O’Reilly, is drawing record viewership. William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that used to be owned by Wall Street Journal parent News Corp, said while Mr. Ailes is a “TV genius” and “very shrewd about who to have on and where to sit the pretty young women and all that nonsense”, his influence has been overblown after a “cult of personality” grew around him.
