Bill Shine, the former Fox News producer-turned executive, who later served as White House communications director under President Trump in 2018-2019, is consulting on Nexstar’s NewsNation cable channel. Shine joined NewsNation ahead of its launch last year (it launched as a primetime news block in September 2020), a spokesperson for Nexstar says. He is not an employee of the TV station giant.
Trump has now burned through five communications directors, raising the question of whether he really even wants one.
President Donald Trump has accepted the resignation of his communications director, Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive who had spent just nine months on the job. Shine will join the president’s re-election campaign as a “senior adviser.” It was not immediately clear if the president urged Shine to resign, or the extent to which he will be directly involved in Trump’s 2020 operation.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Bill Shine got $8.4 million in severance pay from 21st Century Fox after he left in May 2017. He’ll also receive bonus and options payments in 2018 and 2019 amounting to $7 million for the two years combined. The agreement is set to expire May 1, 2019.
The former Fox News executive, who was formally brought into the White House last month as deputy chief of staff for communications, has yet to move into a permanent office or bring on his own staff. But he is already putting his mark on the West Wing, clashing with reporters, improving the production quality of White House events and trying to shape the message of an administration whose communication strategy has always seemed haphazardly dictated by tweet.
Exclusives
Bill Shine, known as an enforcer during his time at Fox News, is now communications director in the Trump White House and leading a crackdown on the press there that came to a head Wednesday with the banning of CNN Kaitlin Collins from an event she was covering as a pool reporter.
Bill Shine, President Trump’s new communications chief and the former co-president of Fox News, was subpoenaed last year by a federal grand jury in New York as part of a criminal investigation into Fox’s handling of sexual harassment complaints, an action that had been previously undisclosed.
Now that Shine is in the saddle, it’s Mooch 2.0: Kelly is being humiliated, Sarah Sanders has been deemed low energy, and the biggest winner of all is, naturally, Sean Hannity.
President Donald Trump is announcing Bill Shine, the former co-president of the president’s preferred television channel, as his deputy chief of staff for communications. His expected hiring was reported last week.
Bill Shine, a former co-president of Fox News and top lieutenant to the network’s founder, Roger Ailes, has spoken with White House officials about taking a position on President Trump’s communications team, according to several people briefed on the discussions.
The continued presence of other executives implicated in stories about harassment, discrimination and intimidation complicate Fox’s ability to change its culture, both in practice and public perception. One of those executives was promoted with Fox’s announcement Monday that Bill Shine, Fox’s co-president since founding CEO Roger Ailes was ousted last summer, had resigned.
Fox News co-president Bill Shine is out at Fox News. The move comes as Shine was due back on Monday after two days out of the office for a pre-planned long weekend. Suzanne Scott becomes president of programming and Jay Wallace has been promoted to president of news. Additionally, Brian Jones, EVP of Fox Business Network becomes president of the network reporting to Scott and Wallace.
The company has quietly put out feelers for a possible new head of Fox News with the preference, say sources, that it be a woman.
As Fox News is roiled by lawsuits and the ouster of Bill O’Reilly, the network’s co-president, Bill Shine, has told friends he recently asked Rupert Murdoch’s sons James and Lachlan — the CEO and co-chairman, respectively, of network parent company 21st Century Fox — to release a statement in support of him, but they refused to do so and Shine is expressing concern about his future at the network.
Promoted to co-presidents in August following the exit of Roger Ailes, Abernethy and Shine oversee both Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, dividing responsibilities for all facets of the networks.
Shine, a loyal right-hand man to Roger Ailes, was little known outside the TV industry before Ailes’s abrupt departure and his promotion. On Friday, he was placed in charge of news and programming at Fox News and the Fox Business Network, where he will lead a newsroom still reeling from Ailes’s sudden fall last month and a groundswell of allegations of harassment.
Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy, both Fox News Channel veterans, were named today by Rupert Murdoch to help fill the void left by the ouster of Roger Ailes.
