Glenn Beck is going off the air

[MadImmortalMan]

Glenn Beck to 'transition off' his daily Fox News Channel show this year


Beck Glenn Beck is going to "transition off of his daily program" by the end of the year but remain in business with Fox News Channel, the network said today.

The top-rated cable news channel announced it has a deal with Beck's production company, Mercury Radio Arts, to develop and produce various TV projects for FNC as well as other platforms, including Fox News' digital properties.

Chalk it up to the fact that Beck, whose syndicated radio program airs on Chicago's WIND-AM 560, has been better positioned than Fox News to profit from his popularity.

Increasingly, Beck has parlayed the devotion of his fans into business windfalls independent of advertising-supported media through book sales, a subscription Web site and personal appearances, including a Chicago Theatre tour stop next week.
"Glenn Beck is a powerful communicator, a creative entrepreneur and a true success by anybody's standards," Roger Ailes, Fox News' chairman and chief executive, said in the announcement. "I look forward to continuing to work with him."

Beck, in a statement, said that "America owes a lot" to Ailes and Fox News and that he "cannot repay Roger for the lessons I've learned and will continue to learn from him and I look forward to starting this new phase of our partnership."

As expected, Joel Cheatwood, the former WMAQ-Ch. 5 news director who helped raise Beck's TV profile first at cable's HLN and then FNC, will leave his post as Fox News' senior vice president of development later this month to official work for Beck full-time. As executive vice president of Beck's  Mercury Radio Arts, beginning April 24, Cheatwood's duties will include serving as a liaison with FNC and managing the company's partnership with the News Corp.-owned channel.

"Joel is a good friend and one of the most talented and creative executives in the business," Ailes said in the anouncement. "Over the past four years I have consistently valued his input and advice and that will not stop as we work with him in his new role."

Cheatwood is remembered in Chicago as the Channel 5 news director on whose watch in the 1990s a series of affronts occured -- including the brief installation of trash TV host Jerry Springer as a news commentator -- that precipitated the loss of both the station's lead anchors, many viewers and a good deal of revenue.

First-quarter ratings showed Beck's Fox News Channel show, the third-highest rated in cable news, lost close to a third of its audience compared with the same stretch a year ago. Among advertiser-prized viewers ages 25 to 54, he was down almost 40 percent.

More critical, from FNC's standpoint, few blue-chip advertisers wanted to sponsor the program because of its sometimes controversial content. Even second-tier  marketers were hesitant to attach themselves.

This was despite the fact that, even after shedding more than 800,000 viewers in the space of a year, Beck's average TV audience of 1.9 million is larger than the combined total of his cable news rivals in the time slot: CNN's "The Situation Room" (718,000 viewers), MSNBC's "Hardball" (684,000), CNBC's "Fast Money" (219,000) and HLN's "Showbiz Tonight" (179,000).

Although Beck was pulling prime-time-sized numbers on a show that ran in late afternoon, FNC management had to notice when ratings were largely unaffected when former Judge Andrew Napolitano filled in for Beck earlier last month. He presumably would be among those considered for Beck's slot, as would Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham.

Beck's fans are devoted, however, and have put their money where their hearts are.

Back in December, Beck promoted book "Broke" with a $90.50-a-ticket appearance in Pittsburgh that was beamed to more than 500 theaters nationwide, where tickets cost $20. Tickets for his April 14 appearance at the Chicago Theatre are priced from $95 to $35. And his glennbeck.com website offers special "Insider Extreme" content and programming for $9.95 a month, $44.95 for six months or $74.95 a year.

http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/towerticker/2011/04/glenn-beck-to-transition-off-his-daily-fox-news-channel-program-this-year.html



Bye, dude.

[Ed Anger]

Maybe he can go to an obscure cable channel just like his buddy Olbermann.

[CountDeMoney]

Maybe he can go to an obscure cable channel just like his buddy Olbermann.

And KO will STILL be more right.

[Ed Anger]

Maybe he can go to an obscure cable channel just like his buddy Olbermann.

And KO will STILL be more right.

But Keith didn't pump up gold so I could make a killing shorting it after the Japan quake. Thank you Glenn.

[Admiral Yi]

Maybe he can go to an obscure cable channel just like his buddy Olbermann.

The two of them could join up with Conan on...whatever channel he's on.

[Ed Anger]

Maybe he can go to an obscure cable channel just like his buddy Olbermann.

The two of them could join up with Conan on...whatever channel he's on.

TBS. Along with history's greatest monster, Carlos Mencia George Lopez.

[CountDeMoney]

Why Glenn Beck lost it
By Dana Milbank, Wednesday, April , 5:19 PM

On Friday, the unemployment rate dropped to 8.8 percent, as businesses added jobs for the 13th straight month.

On Wednesday, Fox News announced that it was ending Glenn Beck's daily cable-TV show.

These are not unrelated events.

When Beck's show made its debut on Fox News Channel in January 2009, the nation was in the throes of an economic collapse the likes of which had not been seen since the 1930s. Beck's angry broadcasts about the nation's imminent doom perfectly rode the wave of fear that had washed across the nation, and the relatively unknown entertainer suddenly had 3 million viewers a night — and tens of thousands answering his call to rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

But as the recession began to ease, Beck's apocalyptic forecasts and ominous conspiracies became less persuasive, and his audience began to drift away. Beck responded with a doubling-down that ultimately brought about his demise on Fox.

He pushed further into dark conspiracies, urging his viewers to hoard food in their homes and to buy freeze-dried meals for sustenance when civilization breaks down. He spun a conspiracy theory in which the American left was in cahoots with an emerging caliphate in the Middle East. And, most ominously, he began to traffic regularly in anti-Semitic themes.

This vile turn for Beck reached its logical extreme two weeks ago, when he devoted his entire show to a conspiracy theory about various bankers, including the Rothschilds, to create the Federal Reserve. To make this case, Beck hosted the conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin, who has publicly argued that the anti-Semitic tract "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" "accurately describes much of what his happening in our world today."

Griffin's Web site dabbles in a variety of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including his view that "present-day political Zionists are promoting the New World Order."

A month earlier, Beck, on his radio program, had described Reform rabbis as "generally political in nature," adding: "It's almost like Islam, radicalized Islam in a way."

A few months before that, he had attacked the Jewish billionaire George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, as a "puppet master" and read descriptions of him as an "unscrupulous profiteer" who "sucks the blood from people." Beck falsely called Soros "a collaborator" with Nazis who "saw people into the gas chambers."

Fox deserves credit for finally putting an end to this. Its joint statement with Beck's production company, claiming that they will "work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects," is almost certainly window-dressing; you can be confident Fox won't have Beck reopening what his Fox News colleague Shepard Smith dubbed the "fear chamber."

In banishing Beck, about whom I wrote a critical book last year, Fox has made an important distinction: It's one thing to promote partisan journalism, but it's entirely different to engage in race baiting and fringe conspiracy claims. Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity may have their excesses, but their mainstream conservatism is in an entirely different category from Beck.

Fox has rightly, if belatedly, declared that there is no place for Beck's messages on its airwaves, and Beck will return to the fringes, where such ideas have always existed. Because his end-of-the-world themes will no longer be broadcast by a mainstream outlet, there will be less of a chance for him to inspire off-balance characters to violence.

There are, happily, signs that the influences that undermined Beck are doing the same to other purveyors of fear. The March Washington Post-ABC News poll found that Sarah Palin's favorability rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents had dropped to 58 percent from 70 percent in October and 88 percent in 2008. Her negative ratings among Republicans are higher than those of other prospective Republican presidential candidates.

In another indication of abating anger, a CNN poll released last week found that the percentage of the public viewing the Tea Party unfavorably had increased to 47 percent, from 26 percent in January 2010. Thirty-two percent have a favorable view.

Beck, in losing his mass-media perch, is repeating the history of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the Great Depression. Economic hardship gave him an audience even greater than Beck's, but as his calls to drive "the money changers from the temple" became more vitriolic, his broadcast sponsors dropped him. He gradually faded from relevance as his angry themes lost their hold on Americans and his anti-Semitism became more pronounced.

It is a sign of the nation's health and resilience that Beck, after 27 months at Fox, is meeting a similar end.

[Siege]

No way.

I love Glenn Beck!

[citizen k]

No way.

I love Glenn Beck!

Glenn Beck doesn't love you.

[MadBurgerMaker]

[Siege]

No way.

I love Glenn Beck!
[/qu

Glenn Beck doesn't love you.

No way.

I love Glenn Beck!

Glenn Beck doesn't love you.

[Siege]

What? Explane!

[Martinus]

A few months before that, he had attacked the Jewish billionaire George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, as a "puppet master" and read descriptions of him as an "unscrupulous profiteer" who "sucks the blood from people." Beck falsely called Soros "a collaborator" with Nazis who "saw people into the gas chambers."

LULZ.

[Razgovory]

What? Explane!

He want's to baptize your ancestors.

[Caliga]

Also, he hates Jews, Seige.