April 18, 2024

Media Decoder Blog: Fox News and Dick Morris Part Ways

The Fox News Channel has declined to renew its contract with Dick Morris, a spokeswoman for the channel confirmed on Tuesday, three months after Mr. Morris was widely derided for predicting a landslide victory for Mitt Romney in the Nov. 6 presidential election.

Mr. Morris is scheduled to appear on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” on Wednesday. He has yet to comment publicly on his separation from Fox, where he has been a regular guest on programs like “Hannity” for years.

Media Matters, the anti-Fox media monitoring group that has called Mr. Morris “America’s Worst Pundit,” has documented what it calls his “vast array of ethical conflicts,” like the time last year when he auctioned a tour of the Fox News headquarters at a Republican fund-raiser. Mr. Morris was reportedly reprimanded for doing so.

But it was his commentary about the presidential race that gained the most attention last year.

Many pundits made failed predictions about Mr. Romney, but Mr. Morris’s flubs were notorious. While other conservatives hedged, Mr. Morris said the day before the election, “We’re going to win by a landslide. It will be the biggest surprise in recent American political history. It will rekindle a whole question as to why the media played this race as a nail-biter, where in fact I think that Romney is going to win by quite a bit. My own view is that Romney is going to carry 325 electoral votes.”

Mr. Romney won 206 electoral votes; President Obama 332.

Shortly after the election, the New York magazine writer Gabriel Sherman reported that Mr. Morris and another prominent pundit on Fox, the former Bush strategist Karl Rove, had been benched. “Inside Fox News, Morris’s Romney boosterism and reality-denying predictions became a punch line,” wrote Mr. Sherman, who is writing a book about Fox.

Last month, Fox renewed Mr. Rove’s contract.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/fox-news-and-dick-morris-part-ways/?partner=rss&emc=rss