Glenn Beck Gets Pushback From Fox News Channel

Synidicated radio talker and media entrepreneur Glenn Beck thinks the television industry as we know it is dying, but that’s not why he left it to start his own digital network, TheBlaze. According to forbes.com, he’s making a lot more money now than he did at Fox News, but that wasn’t it either. He left to save his soul.

“If you stay in it too long, you become Norma Desmond,” Beck said Friday during an appearance at the NYU Stern School of Business, where he accepted a Disruptive Innovation Award from the Tribeca Film Festival. Norma Desmond was a faded screen siren portrayed om 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard,” and that he would not be able to keep his “soul intact.”

“I remember feeling, ‘If you do not leave now, you won’t leave with your soul intact.’”

Before working at Fox, Beck worked at CNN, where, he said, he had an office that looked out on an open-plan office area where producers and reporters had their desks. “I used to call it the Pit of Despair because there are all these people plunking out stories like, ‘I just want to hang myself, I just want to hang myself,’” he said.

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In response, a A Fox News spokesperson reportedly emailed Mike Allen at Politico:

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.

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