-By Warner Todd Huston
While accepting a media award in New York City, former Fox News commentator Glenn Beck offered a little hint as to why he left Fox and went out on his own. It was to save his soul.
Beck made this revelation to the audience at the Tribeca Film Festival where he was awarded a Disruptive Innovation Award alongside such counter-revolutionaries as shock filmmaker Morgan Spurlock and reporter Jose Vargas who made news for outing himself as an illegal immigrant.
Beck told the awards attendees that he feels TV is a dying art form, but, as Jeff Bercovici reports, that isn’t the only reason he left Fox News.
“If you stay in it too long, you become Norma Desmond,” Beck said at the Friday, April 26 awards ceremony. “I remember feeling, ‘If you do not leave now, you won’t leave with your soul intact.'”
This tracks with other statements Beck has made in the past. During a recent conference call held by Beck to which Breitbart was privy, the Internet entrepreneur noted how disheartened he was that even on Fox the hosts and staffers for the various programs were overly competitive with each other.
At the award ceremony Beck related that Fox News chief Roger Ailes was amazed he would opt to quit television when the commentator announced in June of 2011 that he was starting his own Internet only, subscriber-based network, The Blaze. Ailes, Beck said, told him that “nobody” ever leaves TV.
Others, though, have reported that Beck’s departure from Fox was rather more of a mutually agreed to parting of ways. In his book Roger Ailes Off Camera, Zev Chafets made the claim that Ailes was actually looking for ways to either tone down Beck’s act, or get him to leave the network.
Regardless, since leaving Fox and starting his own online network, Beck has reportedly garnered 300,000 subscribers and his The Blaze news site is often a news breaker.
Beck also talked a bit about his tenure at CNN and lamented over the atmosphere among the writer’s room there. “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.
Beck also said he was constantly frustrated by the hidebound production practices in television news. With stationary, three-camera production practices (named the “Desi shot” after TV innovator Desi Arnaz) that kept him confined to a desk as he did his broadcast, Beck felt too constrained. Beck prefers to get up and move around as he speaks and he felt that those long-time TV production practices first invented in the 1950s just didn’t fit his personality.
“All of media is like that. It has a system. But it’s not 1953 anymore. I knew that to be true when I worked at CNN, and Fox isn’t any better,” he said.
Beck also said that if he were to be given a traditional TV network to operate he would begin by serving pink slips. “I’d fire a lot of people,” he said. “A lot of people.”
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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