The Owl Was Once the Baker's Daughter Weblogging: : The Murdochs Have Decided to Remove Roger Ailes--The Only Question Now Is When: "Rupert Murdoch and sons Lachlan and James...
...have settled on removing the 76-year-old executive, say two sources briefed on a sexual-harassment investigation of Ailes.... While Gretchen Carlson’s sexual-harassment lawsuit against Ailes sparked the investigation, sources say it has expanded into a wide-ranging inquiry into Ailes’s controversial management style. The interviews are now being conducted at Paul, Weiss’s midtown offices because of concerns that the Fox offices could be bugged, sources say.... They are also looking into the appropriateness of Ailes’s pressuring employees to speak out on his behalf, against his accusers. For instance, they are focusing on an op-ed written by Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto in which Cavuto called the allegations against Ailes ‘sick.’... One Fox host told me that Ailes loyalists are reporting back on the investigation to his attorney, and Fox contributor, Susan Estrich. ‘They’re scared to death,’ one Fox anchor told me. ‘The mood is bleak.’
It would be interesting to see whether Trumpism will make the Murdoch clan rethink whether not just Fox News but the Wall Street Journal needs a razing and sowing with salt followed by a rebuilding elsewhere. Trump is just a waystation on the road that Ailes, Bartley, Gigot, and company have been walking after all. But can James and Lachlan recognize that?
But I find myself thinking about the young Harvard Law School assistant professor Susan Ostrich, whom I met back in 1981 when I was a junior. What would she as she was then think of the fact that her best-known descriptor forever after will be: "Roger Ailes's lawyer"?
