Glenn Beck and Tyler Perry

After his "Obama in pee pee" stunt earlier this week, Glenn Beck received a flurry of coverage in the news media. An interesting bit showed up in The Daily Beast today by Michael Moynihan, who was moved to take a look at the media empire Beck has built over the last couple years.

And he compares Beck to movie director Tyler Perry:

Beck’s career path is, in a sense, similar to that of actor and director Tyler Perry, played in reverse. Before becoming a bankable Hollywood star, Perry was a bankable star on the “chitlin circuit,” raking in millions of dollars from loyal, exclusively black audiences. Perry became a celebrity before ever trespassing the mainstream, taking his characters directly to his core audience. Beck took his audience from the mainstream and disappeared into the conservative circuit. ...

For his own network, Beck recruited people who understood the media landscape outside of the conservative bubble, and hired pundits who avoid the grassy-knoll stuff. TheBlaze TV employs former Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan, former CNN executive director of program development Joel Cheatwood, CNN contributors Will Cain and Amy Holmes, MSNBC contributor S.E. Cupp, comedian-producer Marlaina Schiavo, whose politics seem more suited to MSNBC, and former ESPN host Raj Nair. To build a New York–based media empire, Beck has been surprisingly ecumenical.