Fox Says Bye To Dick

Ken AshfordRight Wing and Inept Media, Right Wing Punditry/IdiocyLeave a Comment

And I love Erik Wemple's editorial on it:

No more Fox News contributor Dick Morris. His contract to spout republic-damaging nonsense on Fox airwaves has expired, and the network isn’t renewing it.

Taken together with the news that Sarah Palin will no longer be contributing, the Morris development is strong evidence that Fox News has glimpsed the underside of allowing charlatans to brand its coverage. Palin was a roboto-contributor, who responded to everything with a little crack on the lamestream media and a reference President Obama’s socialist heart.

As for Morris’s misdeeds, well, everyone knows what they are. That’s because Fox News presented them so prominently in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. In his prime-time, pre-election appearances, Morris was among the few pundits who wouldn’t hedge his bets; who wouldn’t triangulate his way through the polling numbers; who wouldn’t rummage through scenario after scenario in his analysis.

No, Dick Morris was predicting a Mitt Romney landslide. Fox News fell for it, and surely millions of Americans did as well. After all, in the same breath that he was predicting landslides, he was citing his own expertise:

It’s not a question of being smarter than anybody else. It’s that I’ve done this for a living and there are very few people on television who talk about politics who’ve ever made a living doing it, and most of them are partisan and echoing a point of view, but when you get down to it, a guy like Karl Rove or Pat Caddell or me or even Joe Trippi, we make a living doing this and I’ve made a living doing it for 40 years.

Vast arrogance and loose, poorly substantiated facts: a great combination for a cable-news contributor in these modern times.

Indeed.

Steve Benen and others are sharing Dick Morris stories:

I imagine everyone has their favorite Dick Morris story. My personal favorite was in September 2011 when he made a lengthy argument built around a single observation: the economy lost 30,000 health care jobs in the month of August 2011. There was, however, a small problem: the economy actuallygained 30,000 health care jobs in August. Morris' entire indictment was based on numbers he misunderstood.