The cross-promotion can be a sore spot at Fox News, particularly for its president, Roger Ailes, who has complained about Beck’s hawking his non-Fox ventures too much on his Fox show. Ailes has communicated this to Beck himself and through intermediaries. It goes to a larger tension between Fox News and Beck in what has been a mutually beneficial relationship. Ailes, a former Republican media guru, runs his top-rated cable-news network like a sharp-edged campaign, speaking with a single voice and — ideally — for the benefit solely of Fox News’s bottom line….

[M]ore than any other person at Fox News, Beck operates as a stand-alone entity. He is the only major personality at the network whose office is not at Fox News headquarters in the News Corp building (Mercury is a few blocks down Sixth Avenue). He employs his own publicist, Matthew Hiltzik, a communications consultant who is the son of Beck’s agent, George Hiltzik. Beck receives a $2.5 million salary from Fox News, which bumps to $2.7 million next year, the last of the contract. It is a small fraction of Beck’s revenues, the bulk of which he brings in from his radio and print deals….

Ailes, who declined to comment for this article, has generally been supportive of Beck. But he has also been vocal around the network about how Beck does not fully appreciate the degree to which Fox News has made him the sensation he has become in recent months. In the days following Beck’s Lincoln Memorial rally, which by Beck’s estimate drew a half-million people, Ailes told associates that if Beck were still at Headline News, there would have been 30 people on the Mall. Fox News devoted less news coverage to the rally than CNN and MSNBC did, which Beck has pointed out himself on the air.