Glenn Beck's departure: Murdoch and company mark the depths to which even they will no longer descend.

Glenn BeckRupert Murdoch will kowtow to the Chinese. He will lie. He will make promises about maintaining the old standards at a newspaper he's purchasing and then promptly break them. He'll assign his journalists to dig up dirt on his business opponents. He'll slag the Dalai Lama: "I have heard cynics who say he's a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes." And when it suits him, Murdoch will order his journalistic troops to perform the reverse ferret.

But with the shuttering of Glenn Beck show on the Fox News Channel, we now know that there is a journalistic sub-basement beneath even the genocidal tyrant.

I have no direct evidence that Murdoch killed the Beck show. Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff wrote last summer of Wendi Deng Murdoch making fun of Beck in front of Murdoch, making him "scowl." We also understand that the man who runs Fox News, Roger Ailes, wasn't enamored of Beck. "Half of the headlines say he's been canceled," Ailes told the Associated Press in April, when the show got the hook. "The other half say he quit. We're pretty happy with both of them." And, of course, other Fox journalists weren't keen that the prospect that Beck was "becoming the face of the network," according to a March 2010 Howard Kurtz report.

Whether you view Beck as an "activist" and a "comedian," as TV analyst Andrew Tyndall puts it in the Kurtz piece, or as a carnival huckster and loopy talk-show host with a chalkboard, as others have, he gave the entire Murdoch empire a case of the willies for much of his stay on the cable channel.

Murdoch ordinarily doesn't care that much of what "proper" people think of his enterprises. For several years now, he has sandbagged the press, the police, and a variety of politicians and celebrities in the ever-burgeoning U.K. phone-hacking scandal. He doesn't give a rip when critics denounce Fox News for paying several Republican presidential contenders to appear on-air, thereby incubating their political aspirations, or when they yell at him for donating $1 million to the Republican Governors Association. Bring on the hate, bring on the denunciations. Like the honey badger, Murdoch doesn't care what others think of him.

But even a nihilist?and nihilism, not conservatism, is Murdoch's political creed?has his practical limits. And Beck's show tunneled directly to the space below those Murdochian limits.

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Read more Jack Shafer on Rupert Murdoch.

I don't think it's Beck's outrageousness that got to Murdoch. If we trust Michael Wolff as a guide to Murdoch's psyche, Murdoch "absolutely despises" Fox News' outrageous star Bill O'Reilly, but he likes the money he brings in too much ever to push him out. Also, O'Reilly's outrageousness never reaches the fetid depths that define Murdoch's no-go zone. Say what you will about Bill: Even when he's yelling, his point of view is both comprehensible and internally consistent. You can't say that for Beck's Nazi, Hitler, Holocaust, fascism, communism, world-government, Joseph McCarthy, Obama-"racism," Obama-"affinity"-for-Islam, "Great Awakening," and end-times riffing.

Charting Beck's decline in a March 2011 piece for the New Republic, James Downie wrote:

Last November, in a two-part special that indirectly invoked anti-Semitism, he accused liberal Jewish financier George Soros of orchestrating the fall of foreign governments for financial gain. During the Egyptian Revolution, Beck sided with Hosni Mubarak, alleging that his fall was "controlled by the socialist communists and the Muslim Brotherhood." Beck is now warning viewers not to use Google, accusing the search-engine giant of "being deep in bed with the government."

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large. Follow him on Twitter. You can email him at .

Photograph of Glenn Beck by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

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