Okay, his viewership dropped by more than a million viewers in a year. Sure, 400 advertisers pulled their sponsorship of his program. If we were talking about any other media figure, conservatives would say that was the "free market" talking, deciding that the public wanted a different product than the one this media figure was selling.
But not if you're Glenn Beck. According to Howie Kurtz, radically losing viewership and advertising dollars has nothing to do with Beck losing his job. It's all about him chafing under the restrictions of the suit (rather large suit, in the form of FNC President Roger Ailes) who provided all the chalkboards and underwrote and advertised your vanity rally in DC. How non-supportive of Ailes. Baltimore Sun television critic David Zurawik (who has also castigated MSNBC's prime-time hosts as fascists) thinks that Beck's ever-expanding messianic complex (an accurate diagnosis by video if I ever saw one) just outgrew the confines of Fox News, especially when the legitimate newspeople (*cough, cough*) of Fox News felt more and more marginalized by Beck's insanity.
Howie acknowledges that the "liberal media" had it out for Beck. Yeah, that evil liberal media (which is apparently only Media Matters for Kurtz--wow, how overwhelming. Hard to believe conservatives had a chance against that ). But Amy Holmes is eager to point out that a similarly outrageous string of clips could be culled from MSNBC hosts. Really? Are there MSNBC hosts repeatedly making completely outrageous, fact-free claims night after night? Are MSNBC hosts agitating and fomenting violence? Take your false equivalency and shut the hell up, Holmes.
It's Bill Press who gets the money quote that will forever paint Beck's tenure at Fox:
Only Glenn Beck could make Bill O'Reilly look like a statesman.
A-frakin-men.
The simple truth is that news is a business now. Glenn Beck was bad for business and therefore, the management was no longer willing to keep him on the air. The free market, you tea-baggers, at work. Your ideas just don't work in the marketplace of ideas.
