“Most of what we do on television was developed by Desi Arnaz” in the 1950s, he said. “There’s no reason we still do it that way, except that it works. It drives me out of my mind that they are still using what’s called the Desi shoot, three cameras on the floor.”
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, The Blaze. 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. “I remember feeling, ‘If you do not leave now, you won’t leave with your soul intact.’”
Beck recalled one of his last conversations with Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, his boss for two and a half years. While several accounts have suggested Ailes was anxious to be rid of the controversial host, Beck says Ailes challenged his desire to walk away.
“At the end, when we were leaving, it was a long process,” he said. “Roger said to me, ‘You’re not going to leave.’ And I said, ‘I am.’ And he said, ‘Nobody does,’ meaning leave television….And I said, ‘I’m fortunate because I haven’t been in it that long.’ I knew what this big, huge Fox empire brought to the table, and I had to leave before I became too enamored of that.”
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