Roger Ailes’ secrets command a heavy price. Last week, the New York Times reported that Fox News had reached an out-of-court settlement with Brian Lewis, the former Ailes aide who was abruptly fired in late July. A Fox News executive with knowledge of the negotiations told Gawker that Lewis was paid approximately $8 million in hush money.

Fired Fox News executive Brian Lewis might have been paid, by his former employer, not to reveal the network’s secrets. What could those be?

BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski noted on Tuesday that The Daily Download, the obscure media-news website founded by Fox News anchor Howard Kurtz and his business partner Lauren Ashburn, has disappeared. Yet only a few months ago Ashburn was hyping the site’s traffic to contributors. “Lauren told me that at one point it had a half million views per day,” Lorraine Murphy, a Vancouver web consultant who wrote for the site between May and August of this year, told Gawker. So what happened?

David Folkenflik, the NPR media correspondent and author of Murdoch’s World, recently revealed a little-noticed feature of Fox News’ afternoon opinion panel The Five. It’s called the “leg cam,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like.

David Folkenflik, the media correspondent for National Public Radio, has spent his career tracking the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling, multinational media empire. Now’s your chance to pick his mind.

Sarah Palin, in her new Christmas book, claims Fox News president Roger Ailes once asked her, “What the bleep is so offensive about putting up a plastic Jewish family on my lawn at Christmastime?”

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Shepard Smith, the endlessly endearing (and easily angered) Fox News anchor, has likened the right-wing channel to a “family,” with president Roger Ailes as its domineering father. Which makes it only slightly awkward that in early 2012, the 49-year-old anchor started courting an attractive young production assistant who worked under him on Fox Report With Shepard Smith. Now they are a couple.

Fox News’ abuse of reporters is legendary. But their treatment of Matthew Flamm, a media reporter for Crain’s New York, should be flagged for eternity for its absurdity. As first reported by NPR’s David Folkenflik (and noted in The Washington Post), the channel’s PR team planted a fake tip, using a fake email address—but using a real Fox News producer’s name—about Bill O’Reilly anchoring election coverage of the 2008 primaries, for the sole purpose of humiliating Flamm.

Shepard Smith, the new director of Fox News’ breaking news operation, is by far the channel’s most lovable anchor—a cuddly-if-irascible antidote to his demagoguing colleagues. Like most people on television, however, he’s a lot less nice in person. Especially to waitresses.

Fox News, like its president Roger Ailes, is sensitive about its reputation. So sensitive, according to NPR’s David Folkenflik, that in the late aughts, as part of a new, more muscular PR strategy, the channel instructed its staff to write thousands of pro-Fox comments on websites large and small, wherever anything slightly anti-Fox bubbled up. In his new book Murdoch’s World, about the Australian media titan Rupert Murdoch, Folkenflik reports:

When Fox News unveiled its futuristic newsroom a few weeks back, there was widespread skepticism about whether their collection of giant iPads would help them become better at reporting facts. It didn't, but at least it gave them some pretty great screens to play Candy Crush on!

House stenographer and conservative martyr Dianne Reidy explained her Wednesday night outburst in an email to Fox News’ Chad Pergram: “For the past 2 and 1/2 weeks, the Holy Spirit has been waking me up in the middle of the night and preparing me (through my reluctance and doubt) to deliver a message in the House Chamber.
 That is what I did last night.”

Yesterday, a previously mild-mannered House stenographer unexpectedly seized the Speaker's microphone and began ranting about God and Freemasons as Republicans and Democrats were voting on a deal to end the shutdown.

Roger Ailes’ cable news operation went live on October 7, 1996. 17 years and several wars later, Fox News remains as lively and accurate as ever. To celebrate, the channel bought a bunch of enormous Microsoft touch-screen computers.

During a segment on the government shutdown yesterday, Fox News host Anna Kooiman claimed that President Obama has "has offered to pay out of his own pocket for the museum of Muslim culture." Problem being, besides the complete lie she told about the president, is that a museumby that name in Washington D.C. doesn't even exist.

What Fox News was thinking by allowing a National Taco Day segment on this morning's Fox & Friends other than "let's see how long it takes the hosts to say something incredibly racist to their one Hispanic coworker," I'll never know.

On Tuesday, former congressman Dennis Kucinich and Fox News’ senior foreign-affairs correspondent Greg Palkot interviewed Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus as part of a special that will air on Fox News Wednesday evening.

Howard Kurtz is losing it. Today the quote-unquote media watchdog published 527 words on FoxNews.com about the Hamptons photo shoot of Ben Bradlee’s daughter-in-law, Pari Bradlee, who apparently teaches yoga to Washington A-listers like Howard Kurtz. It’s not that Pari Bradlee’s precise arrangement of undergarments has nothing to do with the media (though, in fact, it does not); it’s that it has nothing to do with anything. It has no point; it has no angle; it has no news. There is nothing there. Except some boobies. Which, to be fair, is probably all Howard Kurtz is really interested in right now.

Brian Lewis’s attorney Judd Burstein just provided this statement to Gawker: