Fox News cleans house: Can the network restore its credibility?

Pundits on the conservative news channel got the election badly wrong, possibly turning off even diehard fans

A couple watches Karl Rove on Fox News during a Republican Party election night gathering in Denver, Colo.
(Image credit: AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

This week, Fox News fired Dick Morris, the former polling guru for Bill Clinton who has since reinvented himself as a Republican analyst and operator. Morris loudly predicted a landslide victory for Mitt Romney in the run-up to the November election, one of several ridiculous prophecies that quickly made him the laughingstock of his profession. As David Weigel at Slate writes, "No single human made as many wrong, botched, bogus, and stupid predictions about the 2012 election as Dick Morris."

Morris's ouster, which followed Fox ditching Sarah Palin, is being seen as evidence that the network — once happy to depart from the political narrative told by other mainstream media outlets — is concerned about its trustworthiness. The channel suffered a precipitous drop in ratings in January, and a recent poll by the liberal-leaning Public Policy Polling found that 46 percent of respondents do not trust the network. According to Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Politico:

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Ryu Spaeth

Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.