The most radioactive man in American television will soon disappear from the screens of Fox News. Goodbye, Mr. Glenn Beck! And sighs of relief were heard not only from the White House (ever since Obama was called a “racist,” which was the final nail in Glenn Beck’s coffin) and from Democrats, but also equally from Rupert Murdoch’s channel, which just announced its divorce from the most paranoid pundit in the United States; the man who has been stirring up support for the tea party for three years, and who arrived to Fox News in January of 2009.
It wasn’t the loss of 400 advertisers, or even the 40 percent decline in ratings for the talk show simply titled “Glenn Beck” that convinced Fox News to get rid of the troublesome pundit. There came a time when what had been a successful program that attracted 2.5 million viewers, during early prime time at 5 p.m. — a monstrous figure for cable (during prime time last Saturday, CNN attracted 678,000 viewers thanks to Libya and Japan) — turned against him. Even on cable channels, sometimes the radioactivity levels eventually kill.
Even if the statement announcing the divorce said that Beck would continue to collaborate with the channel by producing TV specials, that is just a way to save face on both sides; the equivalent of a statement explaining that a CEO left his company to “take his career in a new direction.”
Roger Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon and Ronald Reagan campaigns, told the Associated Press that Glenn Beck’s show, with his denunciation of unlikely enemies or of increasingly imaginary plots in a country that resembled, at worst, Stalin’s USSR, had run its course. “I think he told that story as well as it could be told. Whether you can just keep telling that story or not … we’re not so sure.”
Fox News management feared that Glenn Beck would become the emblem of the Fox News channel, while the pundit himself believed that Fox News had become the number one cable channel thanks to him, which is not quite correct. Glenn Beck became a mega-star by going from CNN to Fox News. Despite the divorce, Glenn Beck won’t go broke. Forbes estimated his income for 2010-2011 to be over $32 million.
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