Off-the-record sniping shoots in both directions. You can view some of this as positioning for what could be a contentious contract negotiation. But the friction is evident in many areas. When I mentioned Beck’s name to several Fox reporters, personalities and staff members, it reliably elicited either a sigh or an eye roll. Several Fox News journalists have complained that Beck’s antics are embarrassing Fox, that his inflammatory rhetoric makes it difficult for the network to present itself as a legitimate news outlet. Fearful that Beck was becoming the perceived face of Fox News, some network insiders leaked their dissatisfaction in March to The Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, a highly unusual breach at a place where complaints of internal strains rarely go public.

While Beck’s personal ventures and exposure have soared this year, his television ratings have declined sharply — perhaps another factor in the network’s impatience. His show now averages two million viewers, down from a high of 2.8 million in 2009, according to the Nielsen Ratings. And as of Sept. 21, 296 advertisers have asked that their commercials not be shown on Beck’s show (up from 26 in August 2009). Fox also has a difficult time selling ads on “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Fox and Friends” when Beck appears on those shows as a guest. Beck’s show is known in the TV sales world as “empty calories,” meaning he draws great ratings but is toxic for ad sales. If nothing else, I sensed that people around Fox News have grown weary after months of “It’s all about Glenn.” I was sitting with Bill Shine, the director of programming, on the Wednesday after the “Restoring Honor” event, which was held on a Saturday and still drawing analysis in the news media four days later. At the end of a half-hour interview in which Shine spoke well of Beck, a look of slight irritation flashed his face. He shook his head slightly. “The president of the United States ends the war in Iraq,” Shine said, which Obama did the night before in a speech from the Oval Office, “and on Wednesday we’re still talking about Glenn Beck.”

NO ONE SEEMS to quite know what to make of Beck these days. On “Fox News Sunday” the day after the “Restoring Honor” gathering, Chris Wallace asked him, “What are you?”

Beck appears conflicted over whether he wants to be the face of Honor Restored or the voice of a Great American Freakout or whether some fusion of the two is possible. He told me that he has enjoyed himself more since Aug. 28, an event that included no references to contemporary politics. It is not clear if this new tenor is a trend or phase or whether Beck is in the midst of a fundamental transformation. “I’m a work in progress, man,” he told me. “I don’t know how to make this transition.” It has become a nagging preoccupation. “I wrote Sarah Palin a letter last night about 2 in the morning,” Beck said on his radio show in September. “And I said: ‘Sarah, I don’t know if I’m doing more harm or more good. I don’t know anymore.’ ”

Beck has made a determination in recent months, Cheatwood told me. “I think what he’s realizing is you have to be careful not to just be part of the noise. You have to transcend the noise.” In the weeks after the “Restoring Honor” rally, Beck’s Fox News show took a decidedly spiritual, historic and even high-minded tone. But near the end of September, Beck returned to a more accustomed noise level. He railed against the “clear and present danger” of progressive ideology and attacked the Obama administration more savagely than he had in some time, singling out Cass Sunstein, the White House’s regulatory czar, as “the most dangerous man in America.”

On Sept. 11, I traveled to Anchorage to watch Beck and Palin perform together at a downtown civic center. A woman outside carried a sign calling Beck and Palin “the dream team,” while another dismissed them as “lipstick and dipstick.”

The crowd was loud and even festive, despite the somber anniversary. Palin spoke first and then introduced Beck. The pair stage-chatted for about 20 minutes before Palin turned over the stage to Beck. He spoke — with chalkboards — for more than an hour. Sitting in the row behind me was a truck driver named Jerry Cole, who was from Fairbanks and wore an “I (heart) Woodrow Wilson” T-shirt with a slash through the heart. “He was the start of the Progressive Era,” Cole said of the long-dead president. “He believed that college intellectuals should decide how the world should be run.”