Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly. | Brian Ach/AP Images for The Hollywood Reporter Fox News' 13-day war Final shots ring out across media as a company and its founding guardian tear each other apart

Is Roger Ailes finished?

Between segments covering the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Tuesday afternoon, that’s what all the on-air talent and producers were checking their Twitter feeds, refreshing The Drudge Report and flipping through their inboxes and Slack channels to find out — to little avail.

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If the Fox News CEO and chairman had plotted to distract attention from the coronation special in Cleveland in a sacrifice play for some other end, he couldn’t have done better. But Ailes, for once, is plotting only part of the story.

Ailes, and his Fox News, are embroiled in an increasingly bitter war against parent company Twenty-First Century Fox, controlled by the family of longtime Ailes ally Rupert Murdoch, and the battlefield is the entire rest of the media. It’s messy.

Whatever was going on behind the scenes at Fox — and reports were that an independent investigation by a white-shoe Manhattan law firm into claims of sexual harassment against Ailes made by former Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson in a lawsuit filed in New Jersey State Supreme Court were not going well for the septuagenarian media mastermind — the war to control the media’s take on the situation was carried out in full public view. It reached its apotheosis during 45 intense minutes Tuesday afternoon as the journalists who cover the media business found themselves subjected to a dizzying barrage of spin and counterspin.

Privately, insiders tried to read the tea leaves to figure out what leaks were coming from where — and what they were meant to accomplish. There were leaks and confirmations and walkbacks and denials, mostly as the rest of the press tried to catch up to Gabriel Sherman, Ailes’ gremlin-slash-biographer and the stuff of Fox News PR department nightmares since the release of his best-selling 2014 Ailes biography, “The Loudest Voice in the Room.”

The speculation was magnified by the fact that all of the talent at Fox News, and almost all of the reporters who cover them, were milling around the same convention floor in Cleveland as the news was developing — though they largely batted away pesky reporters asking questions.

Fox staffers working at the convention on Tuesday afternoon were in shock, with many in disbelief that anything was actually happening. No internal announcement had gone out to staff by the afternoon.

Outside of Fox’s work and studio space in the filing center in Cleveland, security was clearly on display. Security guards were seen moving a table to more fully block the door to Fox’s space, and everyone entering and exiting had to display their ID.

Big-name anchors and executives walking around the convention center all expressed incredible interest in the story, often asking reporters for the latest as they were busy reporting on the convention.

Some wondered aloud about who leaked Ailes’ separation agreement, which appeared for a brief time in Matt Drudge’s Twitter feed, while others wondered about the timing. No one thought this was how Ailes would have preferred to leave the empire he built. Some anchors, who said they were friendly with Kelly and had her number, said they hadn’t heard from her (or that they had not reached out). But all said that the silence over the past two weeks from Kelly — a lawyer herself — as name after name at Fox News came forward to publicly defend their chief, was notable.

The Ailes news cycle started spinning a lot faster just before noon Tuesday, when New York magazine’s Sherman reported that the network’s most bankable star, Megyn Kelly, told lawyers conducting an internal investigation at Fox News that Ailes “made unwanted sexual advances toward her about ten years ago when she was a young correspondent.” Sherman’s sources within the company provided a short timeline for Ailes’ departure from the company: leave by Aug. 1 or get fired for cause.

Sherman also reported that Twenty-First Century Fox has waived non-disclosure agreements with those who signed them (most likely former employees) so that they may participate in the internal investigation.

The story built on a report from the previous day in which Sherman declared that Murdoch and his sons had agreed to get Ailes out of Fox News’ corner office (though later, Sherman reported the sons wanted him fired for cause, while Rupert wanted a big billowy parachute).

That piece included reports that attorneys for Paul, Weiss (the firm retained by Twenty-First Century Fox to conduct the internal investigation about Ailes’ behavior) were looking into “the appropriateness” of Ailes asking current staff to publicly issue statements of support. As of Tuesday night, more than a dozen current and former Fox employees, including some of the channel’s biggest names — Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren and Neil Cavuto — have come forward issuing statements supporting Ailes and denouncing the claims of sexual harassment.

A little after 4 p.m. Tuesday, The Drudge Report was leading with a banner that screamed, “EXCLUSIVE: AILES LEAVES FOXNEWS $40+ MILLION PARACHUTE.” On Twitter, he linked at 4:17 p.m. to a document that purported to be Ailes’ separation agreement. A few minutes later, The Daily Beast jumped on the story, with Lloyd Grove reporting that Fox News had confirmed the news to him: Roger Ailes was gone.

But by 4:27 p.m., Drudge’s tweet with the separation agreement was gone, as was the headline declaring Ailes an ex-employee of the fair and balanced network. Instead, it was replaced by a single unattributed statement: “Roger Ailes has never sexually harassed Megyn Kelly. In fact, he has spent much of the last decade promoting and helping her to achieve the stardom she earned, for which she has repeatedly and publicly thanked him ... ”

By then, though, numerous other outlets — Variety, NPR, Deadline POLITICO — had received confirmation on background from Fox News sources that Ailes was out.

By 4:55 p.m., the Daily Beast story had been retracted and replaced with an item that, in part, read: “Fox initially confirmed Drudge’s report to The Daily Beast, and subsequently walked back that confirmation.”

A little over an hour later, Drudge pulled the unattributed statement, replacing it with a claim that Kelly’s complaint was over a hug “she did not like” in 2006. The claim, attributed to a source, was followed by another development: “‘FOX & FRIENDS’ AND ‘THE FIVE’ ANCHORS, GRETA, O’REILLY, HANNITY SET TALENT MEETING TO DISCUSSING WALKING OUT ON NEWS NETWORK … DEVELOPING …”

As the evening progressed, more leaks, more maneuvering. At 6:50 p.m., Sherman was reporting on Twitter that the negotiations over Ailes’ exit had broken down over the language to be used in the news release. “21CF wants Ailes to ‘accept responsibility for errors in judgement,’” Sherman tweeted. The Murdoch sons want Ailes fired for cause — but acceded to their father Rupert’s wish to provide a soft landing in the form of a cash settlement.

By the time the speakers were getting started in Cleveland, the New York Post — the Murdoch tabloid that had completely ignored the developing saga — went big with a front page headlined “WHAT THE FOX?” and went deep with a long report about the whole saga, even floating Drudge’s figure for Ailes’ supposed golden parachute: $40 million.

What could Ailes do with $40 million?

Just as the prime-time programming for the RNC was getting started, news from conservative digital news outlet Breitbart : “At least one top talent inside Fox News has confirmed to Breitbart News that a major talent meeting among various different hosts is scheduled, and they are considering leaving with Roger Ailes to form a new network to compete with Fox.”

That story has not been independently confirmed.

Developing …

