Tension between Glenn Beck and Roger Ailes? Some at Faux embarassed by Beck - Show "Empty Calories"

[RamboLiberal]

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The cross-promotion can be a sore spot at Fox News, particularly for its president, Roger Ailes, who has complained about Beck’s hawking his non-Fox ventures too much on his Fox show. Ailes has communicated this to Beck himself and through intermediaries. It goes to a larger tension between Fox News and Beck in what has been a mutually beneficial relationship. Ailes, a former Republican media guru, runs his top-rated cable-news network like a sharp-edged campaign, speaking with a single voice and — ideally — for the benefit solely of Fox News’s bottom line.

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Ailes, who declined to comment for this article, has generally been supportive of Beck. But he has also been vocal around the network about how Beck does not fully appreciate the degree to which Fox News has made him the sensation he has become in recent months. In the days following Beck’s Lincoln Memorial rally, which by Beck’s estimate drew a half-million people, Ailes told associates that if Beck were still at Headline News, there would have been 30 people on the Mall. Fox News devoted less news coverage to the rally than CNN and MSNBC did, which Beck has pointed out himself on the air.

Off-the-record sniping shoots in both directions. You can view some of this as positioning for what could be a contentious contract negotiation. But the friction is evident in many areas. When I mentioned Beck’s name to several Fox reporters, personalities and staff members, it reliably elicited either a sigh or an eye roll. Several Fox News journalists have complained that Beck’s antics are embarrassing Fox, that his inflammatory rhetoric makes it difficult for the network to present itself as a legitimate news outlet. Fearful that Beck was becoming the perceived face of Fox News, some network insiders leaked their dissatisfaction in March to The Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, a highly unusually breach at a place where complaints of internal strains rarely go public.

While Beck’s personal ventures and exposure have soared this year, his television ratings have declined sharply — perhaps another factor in the network’s impatience. His show now averages two million viewers, down from a high of 2.8 million in 2009, according to the Nielsen Ratings. And as of Sept. 21, 296 advertisers have asked that their commercials not be shown on Beck’s show (up from 26 in August 2009). Fox also has a difficult time selling ads on “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Fox and Friends” when Beck appears on those shows as a guest. Beck’s show is known in the TV sales world as “empty calories,” meaning he draws great ratings but is toxic for ad sales. If nothing else, I sensed that people around Fox News have grown weary after months of “It’s all about Glenn.” I was sitting with Bill Shine, the director of programming, on the Wednesday after the “Restoring Honor” event, which was held on a Saturday and still drawing analysis in the news media four days later. At the end of a half-hour interview in which Shine spoke well of Beck, a look of slight irritation flashed his face. He shook his head slightly. “The president of the United States ends the war in Iraq,” Shine said, which Obama did the night before in a speech from the Oval Office, “and on Wednesday we’re still talking about Glenn Beck.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/magazine/03beck-t.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all

[get the red out]

1. Like the Tea Party and the Republicans

You create the monster, you own it.

[ixion]

2. "runs his top-rated cable-news network like a sharp-edged campaign"

As opposed to, say, a REAL NEWS network.

[klook]

3. Fog to make the rest of Pox Snooze appear "mainstream"

Love this quote: "...his inflammatory rhetoric makes it difficult for the network to present itself as a legitimate news outlet." :rofl:

Pox is about as legitimate as the phony press conference/town hall meetings Ailes set up for the Nixon campaign (as described in The Selling of the President: 1968 by Joe McGinnis).

[Blue_Tires]

14. that line stuck out to me as well...

[still_one]

4. If ailes and or faux break with beck, beck is finished /nt

[AlinPA]

8. That will never happen. The drooling Fox viewers love Beck.

[grace0418]

5. Empty calories? More like poison. n/t

[ixion]

12. Empty calories are effectively poison...

arguably...

[donco]

6. Beck, the high

fructose syrup of faux news…gotta love it

[AlinPA]

7. Beck is the heart of Fox "news" now. The rightwing wants him as their leader.

[COLGATE4]

9. Ailes' bottom line is viewership. When Beck's ratings continue

to drop he will have worn out his welcome on Fux. Don't doubt it for a second. There's rarely been a more ruthless sonofabitch around in many years.

[AsahinaKimi]

10. Beck is so freaking Arrogant

Even Bill O'Reilly makes fun of him. As for Fox News... I hope this rift widens so far open that Beck falls into it and is never seen again!

[UTUSN]

11. Ya beat me to it & I can't believe I waded through the whole 10 pp

So, I ain't gonna waste the masochism of my excerpting (below). I was going to title it, "Who is LEIBOVICH & why does he write humongously long profiles of dirtbags like Mike ALLEN and now BecKKK?!1

I also punished myself over his Mike ALLEN thing back soon after its April debut, where ALLEN was found to be "weird" and the son of a John BIRCH Society major player, besides being mysteriously a hoarder? and having no life except treking all over the Beltway sychophant territory almost around the clock.


*************QUOTE*************
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/21/mike-allen-profile-we-rea_n_546132.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/magazine/03beck-t.html
Mark Leibovich is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times. He last wrote for the magazine about Mike Allen of Politico.

Being Glenn Beck

By MARK LEIBOVICH
Published: September 29, 2010

.... “Not involved with the Tea Party,” Beck told me, shrugging. While many identify Beck with a political insurgency — as Rush Limbaugh was identified with the Republican sweep of 1994 — to believe that the nation suffers from “a political problem” comically understates things, in his view. “I stand with the Tea Party as long as they stand for certain principles and values,” Beck told me. He is a principles-and-values guy. ....

...Fans approach Beck and give him hugs. Do people feel they can hug Limbaugh?

There is something feminine about Beck — the soft features, the crying on the air, the reflexive vulnerability. It sets him apart from the standard, testosterone-addled rant artists of cable and talk radio. Women tune into Beck’s radio show more heavily than they do to other conservative commentators, says Chris Balfe, the president and chief operating officer of Mercury, which employs more than 40 people. And Beck’s television show is on at 5 p.m. Eastern, traditionally a slot with more women viewers. (On a typical day, Beck’s show is recorded on more DVRs than any other cable-news program.) But Beck also appeals to a more traditionally female sensibility. “He works through things in real time,” Balfe told me. “Maybe he’ll come back tomorrow and say, ‘You know what, I’ve given this some thought, and here’s what I’m thinking now.’ ” Or maybe he’ll come back sooner. Within a few sentences of proposing Obama’s “deep-seated hatred for white people,” he added this caveat: “I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people.” ....

Joel Cheatwood, then the executive director of program development for CNN and Headline News, heard Beck’s radio show in late 2004, when Beck was on the air in Philadelphia, and said he believed that the host could translate to television. Cheatwood, a controversial innovator of television news, pioneered the flashy “if it bleeds, it leads” local-news formats. He persuaded Beck to join Headline News in 2006. ... ....

Beck’s Fox News show intersperses history with weeping laments, melodramatic calls to faith and vehement attacks on “progressives.” He also mixes in campy stage props and laughs straight from the Morning Zoo playbook. One moment, he is giving an impassioned plea for the would-be builder of Park51 to build elsewhere; the next moment, he is discussing possible names for a hypothetical Islam-friendly gay bar next door (“Turban Cowboy,” “You Mecca Me Hot”). ....

“We hate Woodrow Wilson,” another woman called out. This is like a secret handshake among Beck followers, who have heard his diatribes about the evils of our 28th president, a father of the Progressive Era. “I hate him,” Beck affirmed for the Woodrow Wilson-hating women at the Kennedy Center. “I hate that guy.” ....

... In a forthcoming book about Beck, “Tears of a Clown,” the Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes that in the first 14 months of Beck’s Fox News show, Beck and his guests mentioned fascism 172 times, Nazis 134 times, Hitler 115 times, the Holocaust 58 times and Joseph Goebbels 8 times. ....

*************UNQUOTE*************

[AlinPA]

13. Leibovich loves Glenn Beck.