GLENN BECK WILL LEAVE FOX NEWS…..SEE NOTE
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013604576246852394773890.html
By SAM SCHECHNER and LAUREN A.E. SCHUKER
TOO BAD….BECK IS AN ENORMOUS SOURCE OF INFORMATION …..TO THINK THAT A TOTAL PINHEAD LIKE O’REILLY HAS PRIME TIME AND BECK IS OUT IS REALLY A SHAME….RSK
Glenn Beck plans to leave his daily Fox News talk show later this year, ending a program that attracted both a big audience and frequent controversy.
Fox News and Mr. Beck’s production company, Mercury Radio Arts, announced his departure on Wednesday. The two companies also said Mr. Beck plans to start developing a variety of new television projects for Fox News channel and its digital properties.
Fox News, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.
As part of the shift, Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president at Fox News, and Mr. Beck’s chief liaison with the channel, will be joining Mr. Beck’s production company near the end of the month to manage the new partnership.
No date has been set for Mr. Beck’s final show, but his contract with Fox News ends in December.
The breakup will take away one of Fox News’s biggest daily draws. Mr. Beck has averaged 2.2 million viewers in his 5 p.m. weeknight time slot since its 2009 debut, Fox News said, helping funnel a big audience into the channel’s prime-time block. That block, including Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, dominates its competitors, Time Warner Inc.’s CNN and Comcast Corp.’s MSNBC.
Associated PressGlenn Beck, shown last April, will be leaving his Fox News Channel show later this year.
But Mr. Beck’s ratings have fallen recently, down to an average of 1.8 million viewers in March, according to Nielsen Co., down 39% from a year earlier. Among viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, the cohort sold to news advertisers, Mr. Beck averaged 413,000 viewers in March, down 49% from a year earlier, Nielsen said.
Mr. Beck has been contemplating leaving Fox News for some time, people close to the situation have said in recent months. He has a booming business outside Fox News, making the bulk of his money from a widely syndicated radio show, and an online subscription service for fans. Mr. Beck is considering taking over a cable channel or expanding his online subscription service, these people added in recent months.
Critics—often liberal—have decried Mr. Beck’s commentary as incendiary and alarmist. Those complaints have led many advertisers to pull their spots from Mr. Beck’s show, which often runs advertisements known as direct-response, which fetch lower rates. Because of that, it is possible that a less-watched replacement for Mr. Beck could bring in more revenue for Fox News.
Mr. Beck is the third firebrand to leave a TV-news network he helped define in the last year-and-a-half. In January, liberal host Keith Olbermann negotiated his exit from MSNBC, on the eve of its takeover by Comcast Corp. And in late 2009, longtime CNN anchor Lou Dobbs gave up his chair.
In Messrs. Olbermann and Dobbs’s cases, each man saw more freedom to pursue his political views outside the constraints of the network he had helped build.
In a statement, Mr. Beck said he looks forward to continuing to work with the channel, and praised its chairman and chief executive, Roger Ailes:”I 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.”
Mr. Ailes, who in the same press release described Mr. Beck as a “powerful communicator” and “a creative entrepreneur,” said: “I look forward to continuing to work with him.”
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