Fox News: Karl Rove Argument Proves His 'Value' To Network

The on-air spectacle of Fox News analyst Karl Rove publicly questioning his network's call of the election for Barack Obama happened because Rove and Fox's decision desk both had pieces to a puzzle that the other wasn't aware of, a network executive said.

Fox declared Ohio for Obama because its decision desk knew that the uncounted vote at that time in the evening was in areas with overwhelming Obama support. Rove didn't know that, Clemente said. Through his own reporting, Rove saw the actual vote count narrowing to a margin below 1,000 – information the decision desk didn't know at the time. Far from an embarrassment, the incident proved Rove's value to the network as more than an analyst, said Michael Clemente, Fox News Channel executive vice president of news editorial. Rove, former top advisor to President George W. Bush and a prominent fundraiser for Republican Mitt Romney, suggested Fox had prematurely declared Obama the winner in Ohio and thus for the election as a whole. Rove "finally had to concede to the arithmetic, but not before creating a defining image of a partisan, and a network, at war with the very reality it could not avoid reporting," wrote Time magazine critic James Poniewozik.