Karl Rove’s Role at Fox News Questioned

By Chris Ariens 

Jon Stewart has a new slogan for Fox News — taken straight from something Megyn Kelly asked Karl Rove on election night after the FNC analyst and GOP strategist challenged the network’s call giving Ohio — and the election — to Pres. Obama. Seriously, and comically, Rove’s role continues to reverberate. Stewart’s humorous takedown of the FNC incident after the jump. The NYT’s Jeremy Peters has more serious questions:

Was he acting as the man who oversaw the most expensive advertising assault on a sitting president in history, unable to face his own wounded pride? The fund-raiser who had persuaded wealthy conservatives to give hundreds of millions of dollars and now had a lot of explaining to do? Or the former political strategist for George W. Bush, who saw firsthand how a botched network call could alter the course of a presidential contest?

Rove tells Peters why he challenged the results: “I had a concern about premature calls, and in this instance, the concern was shared by my Fox colleague Joe Trippi.” Trippi, a democratic strategist, and Rove sat in a section off the main Fox News election studio, meant to deliver analysis and moderated by Chris Wallace. In the end, Peters writes that Fox News got what they paid for.

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Mr. Rove’s deep connections to Republican politics are part of the reason that Fox News put him on the air on Tuesday night to rebut what its own team of analysts had concluded.

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