BAD NEWS
By LLOYD GROVE
05.01.17 8:25 PM ET
According to industry insiders, Bill Shine’s exit will not
be sufficient to stop Fox News’ PR debacle—or the departure of several more Fox
News execs.21st Century Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch famously despises having his hand forced.
But by compelling the resignation Monday of Fox News
co-president Bill Shine after only eight months on the job—while elevating a
second Roger Ailes loyalist, programming executive Suzanne Scott, to a bigger
title at the cable channel and retaining other top executives who worked
intimately for Fox News’s disgraced founder and CEO—the 86-year-old Murdoch
could simply be prolonging the agony and delaying an inevitable housecleaning.
“I don’t understand what the Murdochs are doing,” said a Fox
News veteran who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re supposed to be great
brand strategists and brilliant businessmen, but the idea that you can plug
this with Suzanne—and done? It’s death by a thousand cuts.”
The announcement comes amid a report from The Daily Beast
that Shine’s close friend, Sean Hannity, is ready to follow him out the door.
Last week, when rumors of Shine’s imminent exit were circulating in the press,
Hannity posted a series of tweets that were widely interpreted as a threat to
leave in protest.
If Shine were to be fired, Hannity tweeted “that’s the total
end of the FNC as we know it. Done.”
In a second tweet, directed at New York magazine’s Gabriel
Sherman, Hannity claimed: “Somebody HIGH UP AND INSIDE FNC is trying to get an
innocent person fired. And Gabe I KNOW WHO it is.”
Said a well-connected media exec: “One of the things about
the Murdochs is they do not take kindly to threats. If they’re paying a guy $10
million and he tweets out threats against the company, that isn’t going to
fly.”
This person added that Monday’s seemingly half-hearted
executive changes reflect “a tug of war going on between Rupert [who was
initially resistant even to parting with Ailes] and the sons [Lachlan and
James, who are pushing for a cultural makeover]… It sends a very bad signal.
Had they cleaned house pretty quickly, and cleaned out four five people at the
top, they wouldn’t have any of this today. This drip-drip thing is killing
them.” ,
Suzanne Scott, previously executive vice president of
programming and development (a position in which she seemed to many at Fox News
more focused on wardrobe, hair and female personalities’ bare legs than on
creative and strategic matters), was promoted Monday to president of Fox News’
profit-driving opinion programming (both the prime-time shows and Fox &
Friends). It’s a role that Shine had filled before being named co-president last
August.
Scott has toiled at Fox News since it launched in 1996,
starting out as an assistant to the late television executive Chet Collier,
Ailes’s longtime associate at various TV outlets as well as his former boss at
the Westinghouse station in Cleveland.
Scott worked for Collier under Ailes at CNBC and the
America’s Talking network, the precursor to MSNBC, and according to Fox News
insiders, Ailes groomed her for a management position, giving Scott production
experience on then Fox News-anchor Greta Van Susteren’s 10 p.m. show before
installing her in Collier’s old programming perch. One of Scott’s
responsibilities, according to a Fox News insider, was making sure that Megyn
Kelly—like Van Susteren a former litigator—would not be her substitute anchor
when Van Susteren left for vacation.
Also promoted Monday—to the position of president of
news—was Jay Wallace, a longtime Fox News executive known for keeping his head
down and not immersing himself in office politics.
No comments:
Post a Comment