For the past two decades, Rupert Murdoch allowed Fox News chief Roger Ailes to occupy one of the most unique — and powerful — perches in American politics and media: running a right-wing political operation under the guise of a 24-hour news network. As long as the profits rolled in, Murdoch virtually never meddled in Ailes’s world — even when his own family protested. “He lets me run it, he doesn’t bother me much,” Ailesboasted of Murdoch as recently as April 2015. But that laissez-faire era seems to be over.