21st Century Fox executive chairman Rupert Murdoch said Thursday that it was “nonsense” that allegations of sexual harassment at Fox News had hurt his company’s bottom line.
“It’s all nonsense,” Murdoch told Sky News, the British broadcast network owned by 21st Century Fox, when asked how harmful the harassment allegations had been for business.
“There was a problem with our chief executive, sort of over the year, but isolated incidents,” he continued. “As soon as we investigated, he was out of the place in hours. Well, three or four days. And there has been nothing else since then.”
“That was largely political because we are conservative,” he said. “All the liberals are going down the drain. NBC is in deep trouble, CBS, their stars.”
{mosads}
The late Fox executive Roger Ailes and former CEO Bill Shine were the target of a lawsuit by a female contributor who claimed Ailes harassed her and that Shine, then the network’s co-president, tried to cover up Ailes’s inappropriate behavior toward female coworkers.
Ailes resigned in July 2016 following a lawsuit from former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson over alleged sexual harassment. He later died in May, the same month Shine resigned over the allegations against him.
Fox has seen several other high-profile departures this year over sexual misconduct claims, including “Fox News Specialists” host Eric Bolling in September and longtime conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly in April.