Why Fox News had to bench Karl Rove

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last updated 11 January 2015

Since the November election, two of Fox News' most prominent political commentators — Karl Rove and Dick Morris — "have virtually vanished," says Howard Kurtz at The Daily Beast, "seemingly airbrushed from the airwaves." What's going on? "Turns out they’ve been sidelined, at least temporarily, by Roger Ailes." New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman was the first outsider to notice. "Multiple sources say that Ailes was angry at Rove's election-night tantrum when he disputed the network's call for Obama," Sherman reports. Former George W. Bush strategist Rove, Kurtz says, "drew national ridicule for challenging Fox's own projection that Obama had won Ohio, and with it a second term."

In that moment, [Rove] became a symbol of a partisan operative not willing to accept an uncomfortable reality.[Meanwhile,] Morris got so carried away in his cheerleading for the GOP ticket that he predicted Mitt Romney would win in an electoral landslide.(The other all-star Fox pundit, Sarah Palin, seems to be making only infrequent appearances now that her political star has dimmed.)Perhaps this is just a cooling-off period — Rove and Morris did pop up a few times after Election Day — until we plunge off the fiscal cliff or something and both men can be brought back as the memories of 2012 recede. Or perhaps, contrary to conventional wisdom, some pundits do pay a penalty for being spectacularly wrong.

On one hand, Obama's re-election gives the channel's TV personalities four more years to stoke anger at a president that most of their viewers dislike (something that will no doubt be good for the channel's already strong ratings). But on the other, the president's comfortable margin of victory left the network with a few fences to mend with viewers who had been assured by those same talking heads that Romney would prevail on election day.

Liberals who love to hate both Rove and Fox are elated, says Billy Hallowell at The Blaze, but the inside story isn't as sexy as they've made it out to be. Rove and Morris' absences just reflect the fact that the election's over. Ailes simply issued a new rule saying that, now that the news has moved on, producers have to get approval from above before booking the guys who were the channel's go-to commentators on electoral matters.

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This is part of "a serious reckoning with reality" that everyone associated with the GOP is, or should be, facing, says Alex Moore at Death and Taxes. "Sometimes numbers and facts are irrefutable — sometimes when you lose you can no longer credibly scream victory in the face of defeat, as Karl Rove tried to do in his now-famous election night meltdown ranting against Fox News' own statisticians. Rove may still be in denial, but Fox News for their part is facing reality and moving on."

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.

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