Why Murdoch Must Fire Glenn Beck

Asked about Beck brouhaha, News Corp. chairman is unrepentant

(NEWSER) - Rupert Murdoch backed his host over his advertisers in a Sky News interview last weekend, saying Glenn Beck probably shouldn't have called President Obama a racist on the air some months back, but what he said was right. Asked about the Fox host's assertion that Obama made racist comments during the Henry Louis Gates arrest brouhaha, Murdoch said, "Um, that was something which perhaps shouldn't have been said about the president, but if you actually assess what he was talking about, he was right." More»

Six more firms to refuse to run ads on host's show

(NEWSER) - The audience for Glenn Beck’s Fox News show continues to swell even as more advertisers decline to run commercials on the program in the wake of the talk-show host's assertion that President Obama is a racist, the Los Angeles Times reports. Beck’s Monday night show attracted 2.81 million viewers, his third-largest audience to date, and Tuesday’s segment drew 2.7 million. More»

(NEWSER) - Fox News and the Republican Party are locked into a cycle that will make a fortune for the network while dooming the party to further defeats, John Cook writes at Gawker. Fox viewership is up a whopping 45% over the last year as "frightened, paranoid, enraged, nativist zealots" flock to the channel, Cook writes, and Fox is turning that fringe into the face of the GOP. "The more viewers Fox attracts, the more voters the GOP repels. And the more voters the GOP repels, the more viewers Fox attracts." More»

Online version of Post gossip column ends after 3 months

(NEWSER) - PageSix.com, the online version of the New York Post's celebrity gossip column, is shutting down after just three months, Gawker reports. The Rupert Murdoch project attracted 1 million pageviews last week when it published photos of Eliot Spitzer's escort, but, "given the difficulty in the economy, it was not the right time for this launch," said one manager. More»

Writers strike wipes out the competition

(NEWSER) - "American Idol"—TV's undisputed ratings champ with its biggest competitors sidelined by the writers strike—is setting records for ad prices. "It's the biggest thing in a landscape where there aren't as many big things as there used to be,'' an ad buyer tells Bloomberg. The price of a 30-second spot bought now rather than in advance tops $900,000. More»