Fox Drops Dick Morris: Good Riddance
Media Matters
Dick Morris earned the title of Worst Pundit of 2012 by being incredibly amazingly disastrously wrong. While not peddling conspiracy theories about UN conspiracies to take over America, Dick Morris appeared on Fox News during the 2012 election confidently predicting not just a Romney landslide but that longshot GOP down-ballot candidates would pull off wins too. He was wrong. Very very very wrong. This led to Fox News banning Morris from appearing on-air after the election and confirming on Tuesday that his contract would not be renewed.
The problem with Morris, as opposed to other Fox News pundits who made bad calls during the 2012 election like Karl Rove, is that he is a con artist. As Dave Weigel points out:
[Morris] used his Fox News hits and Hill columns (he still has the columns!) to pitch candidates that he would concurrently schlep to people who signed up on his mailing list. Hey, did you listen to me on TV and hear about my web site? Great! Donate to the Super PAC for America, which will plow money back into list-building and completely fail to elect any of these candidates.
And not only was Morris hustling viewers, he was misleading them too. He admitted after the election to deliberately exaggerating his predictions to bolster the morale of conservatives watching Fox News. As he told Sean Hannity a week after the election: “The Romney campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory and I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said. And at the time that I said it, I believe I was right.”
The shocking thing is that Morris still seems to have a career as a pundit—he is still writing his column for The Hill newspaper and is appearing on CNN tonight.
Television punditry is frankly not the most ethically pure field. Operatives from both parties like Karl Rove and Paul Begala make self serving predictions while deeply involved in the campaigns of their respective parties and many panels are selected as much for aesthetic as intellectual appeal. But Morris doesn’t meet those low standards. Many television pundits are hacks and some are liars but Morris is in a category by himself. He has no business regularly appearing on cable news.
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