There’s no way any high-ranking official at Fox News was unaware of the alleged behavior of Roger Ailes, who’s been accused by a Cosby-ish number of women of serial sexual harassment and abuse, and also of using spies to collect information on supposed enemies. This scandal runs wide and deep, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if other prominent names resigned for “new opportunities.”

It’s strange Fox has at best an ambiguous relationship with the current GOP candidate Donald Trump. Rupert Murdoch supposedly loathes him, while on-air personality Sean Hannity, the dimwitted equipment manager of a lacrosse team serving a suspension, thinks Republicans who punt on supporting Mussolini with moobs are in dereliction of duty. 

That’s an odd half-heartedness because apart from the leaders of the party, who for decades used coded racist language and encouraged conspiracy theories until the GOP did a backstroke across the toilet, no entity has more enabled Trump than Fox, the logical conclusion of its support of an anti-science, whites-first party. Along with gerrymandering, Murdoch’s “news-entertainment” outlet helped protect the GOP as it drifted further and further into dangerous waters, prepared it for the mutineers, captained by the hideous hotelier.

In a smart Vanity Fair “Hive” piece, Sarah Ellison examines the mood at Fox in the wake of the tyrant’s deposition, with the fog of fear still permeating and the statues yet to be toppled. Her opening:

Few people in the news business have valued secrecy quite like Roger Ailes, the former C.E.O. of Fox News. Ailes’s very own corner office on the second floor of 21st Century Fox’s glass and steel headquarters, in Midtown Manhattan, featured a solid wood door that prevented anyone on the outside from peering in. Visitors had to be buzzed in by Ailes or an assistant. They were also captured on-camera, their image projected to a monitor on Ailes’s desk.

Many assumed that such secrecy was a vestige of Ailes’s formative years advising Richard Nixon. Now, it appears that it may have run deeper. Last month, former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed suit against Ailes for sexual harassment—an event that ushered in a litany of former colleagues with similar stories. Weeks later, Ailes resigned. (Ailes has fervently denied all allegations. His lawyer, Susan Estrich, reiterated those denials. A spokesperson for 21st Century Fox also declined to comment for this piece.)

Ailes’s second-floor office now stands empty. Floors below it, in Fox News’s subterranean newsroom, a former Sam Goody retail outlet, staffers are still coming to terms with the rollicking events of the past month. During periods of crisis, reporters and producers tend to bury their heads in their stories, rallying around one another in their commitment to their work. But there is only one topic on people’s minds at Fox News these days: Ailes.

Sentiment in the newsroom is generally split between those who proclaim surprise (particularly regarding the sheer number of women who have alleged that Ailes harassed them) and those who feel professional relief—not all of them women. Ailes was gender-blind when it came to relentlessly pushing his talking points and admonishing those who did not follow along. Still, others said they remain fearful that even discussing Ailes at all could result in some form of punishment.•