Fox News co-President Bill Shine has resigned and will leave the network within a few weeks, Fox News announced Monday afternoon.
Shine's departure is part of the aftershocks of the sexual harassment scandal that has gripped the network since last summer, leading to the departure of former Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes last July and of star host Bill O'Reilly last month.
Shine will be replaced by his longtime deputy, Suzanne Scott, who becomes president of programming, and Jay Wallace, the executive vice president for news who now becomes president of news. Both have been with the network since 1996, its year of inception.
While Shine has never been accused of harassment himself, a growing number of women at Fox News have alleged, some of them in court documents, that he was aware of deeply inappropriate behavior against them and deflected, ignored or sought to suppress their concerns rather than take actions to address them constructively.
The recent lawsuits of Fox News commentator Julie Roginsky and suspended Fox News host Andrea Tantaros allege that Shine's dismissive behavior regarding such accusations continued after Ailes' departure.
Shine's resignation comes on a day that a Fox News personality sued the network, accusing it of bias. Diana Falzone said she was banned from its shows in late January after she wrote an online column about suffering from endometriosis, a reproductive health disease that she said would likely leave her infertile. In court papers filed Monday, Falzone's attorneys wrote that the revelation "detracted from her sex appeal and made her less desirable" in the eyes of the "male-dominated senior management of Fox News."
The 86-year-old Rupert Murdoch has actively led the network as acting CEO since Ailes' departure. While he remains a figure who generates great affection within the workforce, Shine's resignation shows the elder Murdoch has failed to get the sense of scandal and uncertainty at the network under control.
And questions are unlikely to die down. The new president for programming, Suzanne Scott, has also been accused by some Fox News women in court of trying to intimidate them or minimize their complaints, as has the network's chief lawyer, Dianne Brandi.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
