Glenn Beck is beset by
apocalyptic visions, sinister conspiracy theories, mind-blowing prophecies,
mysterious illnesses, miraculous cures, and, yes, copious waterworks.
But of all of the hobgoblins
fluttering through his mind, consistency isn’t one of them.
Beck regularly contradicts
himself in word and deed—a trait that his less charitable associates call
hypocrisy.
For instance, mere months after
announcing, with typically messianic zeal, that he was heartily sick of
politics and leaving the Republican Party, he spent the past two weekends
barnstorming Iowa with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the winner of Monday night’s GOP
caucuses, and trading insults with also-ran Donald Trump, who calls Beck “a
whack job.”
In his victory speech, Cruz
thanked Beck specifically: “I am so grateful to national leaders, people like
Dr. James Dobson, and Tony Perkins, and Phil Robertson, and Governor Rick
Perry, and Glenn Beck—leaders who have stood and led, bringing together
conservatives here in Iowa and across the country.”
Beck celebrated the victory on
his Facebook page—“It is a great night for the constitution America and Ted
Cruz. We’re one step closer to restoring our principles”—and promised not to
gloat about Trump falling short. “One of those principles is to never revel in
another man’s defeat.”
Indulging a weakness for
grandiosity, the radio, television, and Internet firebrand has been
broadcasting the simulcast of his popular Glenn Beck Radio Program this week
from a full-scale mockup of the presidential sanctum, because, as he explained,
“since we’re going for the most powerful job in the world, the place to cover
that election might be from the Oval Office.”
Colleagues and underlings
interviewed by The Daily Beast—on condition of anonymity out of fear of
retribution—describe Beck’s irresistible personal magnetism and undeniable brilliance
that one called “mad genius,” mixed with a colossal streak of narcissism,
neediness and, above all, capriciousness that have left them feeling whipsawed
and, in many cases, betrayed.
Beck, who turns 52 next week,
was not available for an interview.
Attracted by the idealism of
The Blaze, Beck’s six-year-old multimedia venture—whose heartwarming motto is
“We tell the stories of love and courage where the good guys win”—they instead
tell stories of a sad and baffling descent from a friendly, positive workplace
culture (“like a family,” says one) into an abyss of backbiting and paranoia as
a company of nearly 300 people contracted to around half that size.
What happened?
Former Blaze employees point to
the abrupt departures a year ago of longtime Beck confidants Chris Balfe and Joel Cheatwood, who
are widely credited with making his success possible.
Then
there was the sudden appearance in the fall of 2014—from Israel, via Miami—of a
slightly-built, bald-pated Beck “superfan” who spouted the slick jargon of
Silicon Valley, chain-smoked a vaporous e-cigarette (holding it in his right
hand that is missing two-and-half fingers, the result of a childhood accident
with a meat grinder), and somehow networked himself into Beck’s inner circle.
Beck apparently became
infatuated with Jonathan
Schreiber, who has been regularly spotted in Beck’s expansive,
glass-walled office, sometimes entangled in a hug with the boss, and whose
Orthodox Judaism apparently meshes well with Beck’s ardent religiosity as a
Mormon convert.
Last April, Schreiber was named
president of Beck’s
privately held umbrella company, Mercury Radio Arts—of which The Blaze is a
subsidiary, along with a diverse collection of enterprises including a
publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster, a clothing line, a movie studio,
and a guide to trustworthy real estate agents.
Schreiber, a native of Florida who graduated with a
marketing degree from Yeshiva University, is a 41-year-old tech entrepreneur
whose arrival coincided with the exit of nearly everyone who had steered Beck’s
career and built him into a national brand and wildly successful radio
personality. (None of the dozen sources contacted for this article directly
blamed Schreiber for the departures, but they found the timing rather curious.)
Beck’s syndicated morning show is the
nation’s third-highest-rated, after Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s—and,
like The Blaze, sells advertising for a variety of products designed to ease
your way through the End Times (gold bullion, fireproof safes, identity theft
protection, guns, freeze-dried food, and a “couch cruncher” to serve up
washboard abs while you watch disturbing TV news reporting the downfall and
destruction of everything good and decent).
Employees ultimately gave
Schreiber the nickname “Voldemort,” after the Harry Potter villain—a moniker
that apparently hasn’t reached Schreiber’s ears until now.
Schreiber’s LinkedIn profile
does seem to invest him with wizardly powers: “I connect things: ideas, people,
concepts, ecosystems, anything and everything. I read a lot (a lot), I think a
lot (not as much), I like people, I understand people. I don’t just understand
people a little bit, I see people for who they are not who they claim to be.
“Sometimes I see people for
more than they think they are, sometimes less. Because of this I connect with
people—quickly. I see the white between the text of what I read, or what
someone says, or what someone wants.”
Yet a current Blaze employee
said recently: “It’s so toxic and fractured that everybody has eyes in the back
of their head. You don’t know who’s about to stab you in the back. So the best
thing to do is show up, get your work done, and get out.”
Beck’s penchant for
flip-floppery has been especially conspicuous at The Blaze, a paid subscription and ad-supported
digital television and news aggregation enterprise that he launched in late
August 2010, [Cocksucker.] while still hosting a highly rated afternoon
show on the Fox News Channel.
Beck at
the time was riding high, having just made the cover of Forbes, which at one
point estimated his corporate revenue at $90 million.
Right before The Blaze’s soft launch, Beck
had organized a “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial, the site of
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, that drew a crowd of as many
as a half-million fans.
By
September 2012, when The Blaze signed a deal with The Dish Network for its
programing to be carried on cable and satellite television, The New York Times
reported that it boasted 300,000 paid digital subscribers—an unverifiable
figure that insiders say has plummeted to around half that as The Blaze became
available in 13 million cable households.
Yet the demise of The Blaze—a
once-promising and allegedly profitable venture—has increasingly been predicted
by media observers.
It was even foretold by Beck
himself, at a moment last year when the privately held company claimed to be
making money.
“We’ve got to course-change,
and if we don’t, we’re either going to go out of business or we’re going to be
a crappy, soul-sucking business,” a frantic Beck, looking pudgy and exhausted
in distressed jeans and a pumpkin-colored cardigan, warned Blaze employees
during an in-house session last February at the company’s New York studios—a
video of which was obtained by The Daily Beast.
“You’ve seen this company start to slide
into that crappy zone. No! I’ll shut the damn thing down before we become
everything we despise.”
The majority owner harangued
his minions: “We are three million dollars in the hole! That means we are three
million dollars from profit. That means I have to take three million dollars
out of my wallet, and I have done this now for several years. I don’t have
money left. I’m out... I need three million dollars [in savings] by the end of
the year. If we wait, it’s gonna be massive, bloody cuts.”
Massive, bloody cuts soon
followed, as the debt ballooned to at least $5 million and as much as $10
million, according to current and former Blaze employees.
On May 11, 2015—a day Beck staffers have dubbed “Black
Monday”—dozens were laid off in New York and the Dallas suburb of Irving,
Texas. There, Beck had purchased a 72,000-square-foot studio complex and
corporate headquarters in the Las Colinas neighborhood, and built his fake Oval
Office.
The fired employees (one of
whom, a big, bluff Irishman who supervised the lighting for the New York
studios, broke down sobbing at the news) received their notice not from Beck,
who had personally recruited many of them, but in antiseptic phone calls from
the corporate HR department.
Beck,
meanwhile, showed up at Las Colinas driving his brand new Maybach, proudly
showing off the nearly-$200,000 sleek black sedan that he’d just purchased to
add to his fleet of luxury vehicles, including an armored, bulletproof Mercedes
limo and a similarly outfitted Chevy Suburban.
Beck,
whose net worth Forbes puts at more than a $100 million, was crying poormouth,
but he had also purchased—through Mercury Radio Arts, named for the production
company of Beck’s hero, Orson Welles—the opulently appointed DC-9 that had been
owned by his late friend, right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.
The
vintage jetliner cost around a million dollars, due to its great age, but is
ruinously expensive to maintain, operate, and fuel, according to Blaze
insiders, and required the hiring of two pilots at tens of thousands of dollars
per month—a corporate expense to be added to the estimated million dollars a
year for Beck’s personal security force.
Beck
promptly ordered his private jetliner repainted with the logo of his 1791
clothing line—a crown floating over a skull-and-crossbones ornamenting the
tail.
“I was really disgusted by it,”
one of the ex-employees told The Daily Beast.
Two other Dallas-based
employees—one of whom managed to find a job at another media company before the
ax could fall—recalls a dispiriting meeting with Beck and his producers during
this dark period in late April.
The producers, who were on The
Blaze’s payroll for Beck’s hour-long television program that airs daily at 5
p.m., asked to see Beck in his office without Schreiber being present, and Beck
reluctantly granted them an audience, according to these witnesses.
“OK, what is it?” Beck asked
impatiently.
One of the producers piped up:
“When I got here, this was a family company, but now it has become just like
any other company that’s ruthless, that can get rid of people at the drop of a
hat. I feel like there’s nothing to prevent me from going to work at any other
company where I can punch a time clock, and go home.”
Beck looked hurt and surprised.
“I’m really sorry you say that,” he said,
“because I’ve never felt closer to my staff than I do now”—an assertion that
struck many in the room as coming from a Bizarro-World alternate reality.
Beck had preached
“transparency” and boasted of an open-door policy, but in the months since late
2014, he had become increasingly distant and unapproachable.
Beck added, one of the
witnesses recalls, that “The Blaze was sucking him dry, and he’s been funding
it and throwing money into an empty pit, and he wasn’t going to do it anymore.
He wasn’t going to keep propping it up. And he was going to phase out the New
York office.”
This
last vow from Beck carries a certain irony; with Beck’s approval and active
participation, The Blaze signed a 10-year lease on a 35,000-square-foot space
on Manhattan’s Bryant Park, previously occupied by Yahoo. At around $2 million a year in rent, it represented a 50
percent savings from the previous arrangement in which television studios and
corporate offices were located in separate facilities. Now the company is
desperately seeking a tenant to take over the Bryant Park space.
Last summer, say former Beck
staffers, American Express suddenly declined charges on corporate credit cards
for the booking of airline tickets and hotel rooms for guests on Blaze
programs.
Several employees—like Beck
confidant Kraig Kitchin, the co-founder of Premiere Radio Networks who was The
Blaze’s interim CEO until he resigned last week—were forced to charge business
expenses on their personal credit cards.
One former employee told The
Daily Beast that he’s still waiting for a $200 reimbursement for an expense
that he claimed six months ago.
“I know much of what has
happened since December of 2014, but also much of it has been structural and
behind the curtain,” Beck wrote in an email last week on the occasion of
Kitchin’s resignation as chief executive of The Blaze.
“We were a company that was
swimming in debt. With the hard work of Kraig, Jonathan [Schreiber], and now
Misty [Kawecki, the chief financial officer] we will be debt free by summer.
This is miraculous and takes all of the downward pressure off of us.”
Yet
some of the signs for the business are hardly reassuring. In November 2014, for
instance, TheBlaze.com was attracting 29 million unique visitors per month,
according to figures from the Web traffic measure service Quantcast. But by
November 2015, monthly traffic for the TheBlaze.com had dropped to 16.4 million
unique visitors, and traffic for the associated website GlennBeck.com had
plunged from 4.4 million to 1.4 million uniques.
Many of the pinked-slipped
staffers, drawn by
Beck’s charisma and ambitious plans for original television, feature films, and
even a theme park—following the business model of Beck’s other hero,
Walt Disney—had left secure jobs at CNN, Fox News, and elsewhere, and some had
uprooted families in far-off cities, to join what seemed an exciting, inspiring
adventure.
Seventeen months before Black
Monday, during a town hall in a leased auditorium at The New York Times event
space, Beck had dazzled his troops in a meeting that several witnesses say had
the fervor of a tent revival.
Beck announced onstage that
he’d give $5,000, then and there, to anyone who wasn’t on board. There were no
takers, several attendees recalled, although one witness told The Daily Beast
that an unidentified young intern might have tried to collect.
Beck had already thrown a
lavish Christmas party for the staff of Mercury Radio Arts and The Blaze at his
suburban Dallas estate, complete with catering and an open bar under a huge
backyard tent. (As a Mormon teetotaler and recovering alcoholic, Beck stayed away
from the booze.)
“We all had a good time,”
recalls one attendee, “and Glenn talked to me and a couple of colleagues, and
said, ‘You guys are the true visionaries of the company who are going to help
build it.’ He made you believe that you were really onto something.”
This person, like many others,
had left behind a wife and kids in another city to work at Las Colinas. “I was
away from my family, but the sense of family and the sense of community we had
within the company made me look forward to going to work with people I
considered a second family,” he says. “It was a very good feeling, a great
environment to be in.”
On
leaving Beck’s Christmas party, everyone received a gift bag containing, among
other things, one of their host’s favorite books, How to Be Like Walt:
Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life.
“I read
it cover to cover,” says the former employee, “and I remember thinking, ‘Wow.
We’re at the beginning of something fantastic, who knows where it was headed?
And Glenn was a visionary. Glenn was a thinker. Glenn was Walt Disney!’”
Beck—for all his passionate
intensity and Pied Piper charm—turned out to be hardly at all like Walt.
In November 2014, as Jonathan
Schreiber was settling in at Las Colinas, a tearful Beck announced to his fans
that he had recently been cured of a mysterious brain illness that “quite
honestly has made me look crazy.”
“It has baffled some of the
best doctors in the world, it has frightened me and my family as we didn’t know
what was happening,” Beck told viewers on The Blaze, adding that he had been
suffering from the malady in 2009 when he infamously claimed, during an
appearance on Fox & Friends, that President Obama is a racist with
“deep-seated hatred of white people.”
Beck claimed he’d been cured by
various unorthodox treatments that included hormones, physical therapy, and
being spun around and around while strapped to a giant gyroscope.
“We didn’t know at the time
what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands or feet or arms
and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them or set them on fire or
pushed broken glass into my foot,” Beck confided. “I can’t tell you how many
nights my wife would sit in the light looking to the bottom of my feet to make
sure there really wasn’t any glass in them.”
The following month, Beck’s top New York-based
executive, Chris Balfe, who was president of Mercury Radio Arts and CEO of The
Blaze and had been at his side for 15 years, made one of his regular
visits to Las Colinas.
Beck summoned Balfe to his
office and essentially fired him. The two had apparently disagreed on Beck’s
insistence that he would discard his core identity as a political commentator,
and focus on lifestyle concerns.
According to multiple sources,
when a stunned Balfe retreated to an office for visiting executives to absorb
what had just happened, Beck’s personal assistant told him: “I’m going to need
that seat when you’re done with it”—apparently for Schreiber.
Joel
Cheatwood, The Blaze’s chief content officer who midwifed Beck’s television
career at HLN and then Fox News, soon followed Balfe out the door, along with
Carolyn Polke, The Blaze’s president, and Chris’s brother Kevin Balfe, who had
been overseeing Mercury Radio Arts’s publishing arm; they are now all together
at media, branding, and tech startup called Red Seat Ventures. Beck’s longtime
agent, George Hiltzik, also departed.
Schreiber, meanwhile, seems to
have consolidated his power over Beck’s less than magical kingdom.
He welcomed his longtime friend
from the tech world, Stewart Padveen, to take over as The Blaze’s fourth CEO since Balfe’s
defenestration.
A dozen Blaze veterans
interviewed by The Daily Beast described Schreiber as someone who makes many
employees uncomfortable. It’s not just that he uses the James Altucher phrase,
“Let’s have idea sex,” as a term meaning a brainstorming session.
Or that, on Schreiber’s
appointment to the top job at Mercury Radio Arts last April, he jokingly stood
in front of a projected image of the Presidential Seal while “Hail to the
Chief” blared over the sound system. (Most employees gathered for the spectacle
were decidedly unamused.)
Also humorous—apparently—was a
sign marking Schreiber’s reserved parking space, referring to him as “El
Presidente.” These days Schreiber, who—unlike many at The Blaze—continues to
think it funny, keeps the parking sign on a bookshelf in his office.
Schreiber, for his part,
rejects the notion that he has somehow gained Rasputin-like influence over
Beck, and persuaded him to explode his company and banish everyone who had been
close to him. It’s a scenario he finds ludicrous.
“What if we reverse that?”
Schreiber emailed The Daily Beast. “Glenn Beck, brilliant media mogul, realized
he was unhappy in the direction his company was going so he brought in new
blood. The goal being to put the company in the right direction. Through that
process we separated with many people. Some will be missed, some less so.”
Schreiber added: “When I asked
for the org chart [the organizational chart of how the company is set up in
terms of authority and responsibilities], I received something that looked like
the solar system. Not exactly HBS [Harvard Business School] type stuff.”
Schreiber defended his tenure
at The Blaze and Mercury Radio Arts.
“I am very proud of my work
here, I am very proud of the culture we have created AND PROUD OF [his capital
letters] the people WE have been able to bring in to the fold,” he emailed.
“2015 was a great year for MRA we had 2 bestselling books, Glenn’s radio show
CONTINUED TO PERFORM STRONGLY AS THE #3 RADIO SHOW IN THE COUNTRY and did
really well economically... THE Blaze IS POSITIONED WELL TO FURTHER MAXIMIZE
ITS POTENTIAL IN 2016.”
As for complaints about his
leadership style, Schreiber emailed: ”[T]hat’s life... ESPECIALLY DURING TIMES
OF CHANGE AND TRANSITION. No one likes to admit that they are not here because
of themselves, it must be Voldemort.”
Whether Glenn Beck needs the
magic of wizards to save his media dream remains to be seen—but expect the
denouement to his own fantastical tale to be every bit as dramatic as a Harry
Potter movie.
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