This morning at 9am, Shine met with Murdoch to put an end to the speculation. According to a friend, Shine said, “What are we doing here? Let’s make a deal.” The separation was amicable, sources on both sides said. Shine told Murdoch, “I’ve invested nearly a quarter century of my life helping to build this network and I’m sick of becoming a distraction.”

Shortly after I broke the news of Shine’s departure, Fox News employees scrambled to make sense of the shakeup. “I have no idea what is going on,” one anchor told me. They soon got their answers when Murdoch announced he was elevating Shine’s deputy, Suzanne Scott, to be president of programming. Jay Wallace, a longtime Fox producer, will be president of news. While the ascension of a woman to a top leadership role is a marked change for Fox, Scott’s appointment shouldn’t be seen as a culture change. Like Shine, she was a fierce Ailes loyalist. And as I’ve reported, she enforced Ailes’s dictums, including his mini-skirt dress code for on-air women. She was also involved in monitoring former Fox booker Laurie Luhn while Ailes allegedly carried on a psychologically and sexually abusive relationship (Scott denies knowing about it).

Many people at Fox News don’t expect Shine to be the last of the Ailes acolytes to leave. In the wake of Hannity’s tweets last week, sources inside Fox speculated today that he might follow Shine out the door. But a close friend of Hannity’s said that’s not the case: “He didn’t leave for Ailes. He ain’t leaving for Shine.” Hannity tweeted tonight that he is not negotiating an exit from Fox.