It was Ms. Carlson who once said that when she was a host on the set of "Fox & Friends," the network's morning program, "pants were not allowed." Fox News has denied any such rule.
A great surprise in the news on Wednesday was that, at a casual glance, Ms. Carlson could seem like the symbol of gender norms that no longer seem so normal or acceptable. When Jon Stewart parodied her in 2009, one of his gripes was that Ms. Carlson was playing the role of Chrissy from the 1970s sitcom "Three's Company" — the flighty blonde role Suzanne Somers had — when Ms. Carlson in fact attended Stanford and Oxford, and won the Miss America crown in 1988 with a masterful violin rendition of "Zigeunerweisen" by Sarasate.
A video mash-up that Bloomberg Politics put together this week shows repeated instances in which male counterparts commented on Ms. Carlson's appearance on air. At times, she plays along. But if you watch carefully, you will notice a piqued expression on Ms. Carlson's face as she deadpans in one clip "all women should be reading bra stories" and jokes that she will report her colleague Brian Kilmeade to human resources for calling her "a skirt."
She was not alone at Fox in venting such frustration. Not long after Ms. Carlson walked off the "Fox & Friends" set in 2012 — after a sexist joke by Mr. Kilmeade — the Fox News host Megyn Kelly made a splash by eviscerating the conservative commentator Erick Erickson for saying that in nature "the male typically is the dominant role."
By this past May, Ms. Carlson was writing on the Fox News website that the actress Robin Wright deserved praise for demanding the same pay as her co-star Kevin Spacey on the Netflix show "House of Cards,"' calling it "a great message for girls and women of any age," and boys and men, too. Viewers could watch cultural norms at Fox changing in real time, but that's not the behind-the-scenes environment Ms. Carlson described in her suit.
Fox News executives rejected Ms. Carlson's depiction of Mr. Ailes as they began their defense Wednesday night and Thursday, portraying her as a jilted television talent who was retaliating after being let go — at least partly for committing the cardinal sin of losing to CNN in June in the ratings for the demographic group advertisers covet.
On Thursday, several Fox News stars questioned Ms. Carlson's motives. "She's disgruntled she didn't get her contract renewed and the timing is very suspicious," the Fox host Greta Van Susteren said in a telephone interview. Asked about the behavior Ms. Carlson described, Ms. Van Susteren said, "I've been here 15 years I haven't seen it and frankly I'm rather outspoken and I don't think I'd stick around for it."
In a similar vein, a Fox News weekend host, Jeanine Pirro — a former prosecutor and judge who has known Mr. Ailes for 30 years — told me, "This is something that is totally inconsistent with the man I've known probably longer than most people who work in that building."
Fox News shared with me handwritten thank-you notes they said Ms. Carlson wrote after the meeting in which, she says, Mr. Ailes propositioned her. In one of them she tells Mr. Ailes, "I'd love to stay at Fox."
But for all that, there were a couple of articles in the last two days quoting former female staff members — albeit anonymously — echoing Ms. Carlson's descriptions of Mr. Ailes's behavior and the overall climate at Fox.
A few years ago, Mr. Ailes might have been free to defend himself with the unquestioned support of his like-minded longtime patron, Mr. Murdoch, who has stood by him as Mr. Ailes has brought in huge revenue — an estimated 20 percent of the total profits for 21st Century Fox for fiscal 2016, according to Anthony DiClemente, an analyst with Nomura Securities.
But Mr. Murdoch's sons have different political and corporate sensibilities than their father. They began taking increasing control of the family's publicly traded business after it took steps to move the corporate culture away from the pirate-ship mores for which it was known, before a phone-hacking scandal at its newspaper division in Britain threatened its future.
Mr. Ailes had initially appeared to balk at reporting to the sons instead of to the father, and in his last contract agreement in 2015, 21st Century Fox said he would report to all three men. Their approval of an independent investigation of Ms. Carlson's allegations is an acknowledgment of the new era in which Mr. Ailes and the elder Mr. Murdoch now find themselves.
So the world is changing. The question now is how Fox News and Mr. Ailes change with it.
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