Fox News Is Keeping Karl Rove & Dick Morris Off the Air Following Poor Election Predictions, Report Claims

Karl Rove, former Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to former President George W. Bush (Photo Credit: AP)

In the wake of the election, following predictions that Republican Mitt Romney would definitively beat President Barack Obama, commentators and politicos like Karl Rove and Dick Morris have received a great deal of criticism. And it seems, at least according to sources who spoke exclusively with New York Magazine, that Fox News is now intentionally keeping both men off the air.

In the wake of the elections, "multiple Fox sources" told the outlet that the network's president, Roger Ailes, has been repositioning on-air coverage to comply with the post-election climate. Among his changes, he has purportedly sought to remove from air any "faces associated with the election."

This change, in effect at least temporarily, has meant that Morris and Rove, two men who had prominent placement during the 2012 presidential campaign, have appeared more infrequently since Obama's re-election win. New York Magazine explains the details of the regulatory changes:

For Karl Rove and Dick Morris — a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox’s anti-Obama campaign — Ailes’s orders mean new rules. Ailes’s deputy, Fox News programming chief Bill Shine, has sent out orders mandating that producers must get permission before booking Rove or  Morris. Both pundits made several appearances in the days after the election, but their visibility on the network has dropped markedly. Inside Fox News, Morris’s Romney boosterism and reality-denying predictions became a punch line. At a rehearsal on the Saturday before the election, according to a source, anchor Megyn Kelly chuckled when she relayed to colleagues what someone had told her: “I really like Dick Morris. He’s always wrong but he makes me feel good.”

Political strategist Dick Morris (Photo Credit: Fox News)

Ailes was purportedly angry after Rove's election-night dispute over the network's initial call that Obama was victorious. While a spokesperson for the Fox president claimed that reports of a rift are inaccurate, the network did confirm the new booking rules, noting that they are rooted in the fact that the election has concluded.

Read the New York Magazine report here.