Here we go kiddies. Strap yourselves in because this ride is gonna get bumpy.
Last week Glenn Beck told Forbes Magazine that it was entirely his decision to leave Fox News and that it had nothing to do with the fact that he was bleeding viewers and advertisers like a drunken hemophiliac:
Beck: If you stay in it too long, you become Norma Desmond. I remember feeling, ‘If you do not leave now, you won’t leave with your soul intact.’
Beck apparently stayed too long because his soul is in tatters, and he is committed to likewise shredding the souls of his disciples. Setting that aside, the folks at Fox News are not taking Beck’s whining sitting down. They gave Politico a response that doesn’t pull any punches:
Fox Spokesman: Glenn Beck wasn’t trying to save his soul, he was trying to save his ass. Advertisers fled his show and even Glenn knows what that means in our industry. Yet, we still tried to give him a soft landing. Guess no good deed goes unpunished.
That response is interesting for a couple of reasons beyond the obvious slap in the face to Beck. First, it ought to make things a little uncomfortable for Bill O’Reilly, who is the only Fox host who still invites Beck back to the network. Is Beck still welcome? Will Bill mention that his bosses regard Beck as an ungrateful loser?
Secondly, this unidentified Fox spokesman has confirmed something that Fox has denied for years: that Beck’s racist and rancid antics cost the network advertisers and revenue. The company line at Fox was that “there has been no revenue lost.” But clearly that was not the case, as they now admit.
Beck also told Forbes that “I knew what this big, huge Fox empire brought to the table, and I had to leave before I became too enamored of that.” This reluctance to fall victim to the siren call of television has apparently subsided. Beck is now spending millions of dollars to elbow his way back into the television world he says is dying. His “Get The Blaze” campaign was launched to recruit his disciples into badgering cable systems to carry his web cast. It’s an initiative that reeks of the toxic socialism that Beck pretends to despise, because he wants all cable subscribers to fatten his wallet even if they don’t watch his show.
The campaign appears to be floundering. Beck posted a recent update that sobs “We think that the tens of thousands of emails you’ve been sending are piling up unread.” Gee, the cable TV market is uninterested in assuming the burden of a washed up Tea-vangelist who spews conspiracy theories and hate speech. It must be a plot by Obama’s czars to silence his perversion of the truth.
Stay tuned, because it’s a fairly good bet that Beck will escalate this feud with Fox by saying something typically idiotic and designed to get him press. And that’s his only real mission in life anyway.
