(OPINION) Media personality and former Fox News host Glenn Beck says he was personally asked by Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch not to talk about God on the air.

During a BlazeTV network broadcast on April 26, Beck, 57, told his audience about the alleged encounter after recapping the latest on another former Fox News opinion host, Tucker Carlson, who parted ways with the cable channel last week.

According to the Christian Post, Beck shared a story in which he claimed Murdoch told him specifically not to use the word “God” on air. “This is something that bothers Rupert deeply, deeply bothers him,” said Beck. “I was told not to use the word ‘God’ on the air anymore.


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“And I was like, ‘Wow, OK’… that really bothered them, Rupert doesn’t like that.” In an April 26 post on Twitter, Beck wrote: “I don’t know if Tucker Carlson’s speech about God and prayer was the final straw, but I have a feeling it DEEPLY bothered Rupert Murdoch.”

During the segment, Beck read from a recent report from Vanity Fair alleging that Carlson’s departure from Fox was less about a nearly $800 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s reporting on the 2020 election and instead about Carlson’s “religious talk.”

According to the report, Murdoch was unhappy with a speech Carlson delivered at the Heritage Foundation just days before the Fox News announcement in which Carlson spoke bluntly about the moral state of America and an ongoing battle between “good” and “evil.”

But while Carlson’s Heritage speech could be considered more of a sermon, it was a dinner Murdoch had with his ex-fiancée and Carlson that some suspect might have been the final straw.

Citing an anonymous source, Vanity Fair reported that Murdoch was put off by “Carlson’s messianism because it echoed the end-times worldview of Murdoch’s ex-fiancée Ann Lesley Smith,” who reportedly called Carlson “a messenger from God.”

The source told Vanity Fair: “Murdoch had seen Carlson and Smith discuss religion firsthand. In late March, Carlson had dinner at Murdoch’s Bel Air vineyard with Murdoch and Smith…During dinner, Smith pulled out a Bible and started reading passages from the Book of Exodus.”