No one listens to Glenn Beck anymore — especially now that the one person who was attracting people to his site, The Blaze, has departed. Bill O'Reilly no longer has a job. And so, like peanut butter and chocolate — horrible, horrible chocolate — the two may be uniting.
According to Vanity Fair, O'Reilly said Monday that he'd be working with Beck "every Friday" on The Blaze. “It’s a good outlet for me to, you know, discuss things back and forth with Beck, who’s a good friend," O'Reilly said on his show, "No Spin News." He added, "We don’t agree on everything, but it’s very lively.”
Normally, when TV stars part ways with their employer, they frequently are bound by so-called "non-compete" clauses which prevent them from defecting to rivals until an expiration date. O'Reilly's exit agreement with Fox News did not have a non-competition clause, according to the celebrity news show Extra.
The reunion makes sense to some extent. Beck and O'Reilly have been pretty close in the past. Beck, when he had a Fox News show, was a regular guest on "The O'Reilly Factor." The two also paired up for one of O'Reilly's never-ending tours a few years ago.
Media analysts will likely be stroking their chins about what this means long term. Beck left Fox News when conservative media was at its height. The current landscape looks different, though. Sinclair Broadcasting is expanding around the country, and it's notably conservative. So if Fox News is falling apart — top executives are leaving left and right — the big question is who would be around to pick up the pieces.
Without a big name outside of Beck to rally around, The Blaze never seemed like a true candidate for that position. Now, with the possibility of O'Reilly and Beck working together as a conservative "dream team," perhaps it has become a new power-player in the making.
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