If Congress Slaps Rove with Contempt, How Will His Bosses at Fox and Newsweek Deal with It?

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. Posted May 22, 2008.

If Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) holds true to his recent promise to slap Karl Rove with a contempt of Congress charge for refusing to answer questions about explosive abuse-of-power allegations and whether Rove unleashed the Justice Department on a prominent Alabama Democrat, it will be interesting to see how Rove's newfound media employers at Newsweek, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal handle the story.

It will also be worth noting how Beltway opinion-makers in the press, who in recent weeks have been praising Rove for his second act as a full-time pundit, deal with the messy development.

When Rove began lining up media jobs following his 2007 White House departure, there were howls of protest about such an obvious and controversial partisan being embraced by media outlets as a news analyst.

The politics-to-press revolving door is not good for journalism. (We need more reporters, not pundits.) But the trend is not going away, and history shows the media are far more willing to hire partisan Republicans than Democrats.

My beef with the Rove hiring, though, centers on two issues related specifically to him. The first is about the still-unfolding saga out of Alabama (more on that below) and the way Rove's new employers consistently downplay that troubling story. As do journalists now busy handing out kudos to Rove for his talking-head talent.

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, why is Rove being held up as a paragon of political analysis at the very moment the Republican president he helped mold, and the Republican Congress he helped steer, are both in complete free falls? I don't remember the mainstream media clamoring to sign up the political insights of Hamilton Jordan just as President Jimmy Carter plummeted in the polls.

According to the most recent surveys, President Bush's current second-term debacle exceeds any other White House calamity in modern times. Yet the man who made it all possible, the "brains" behind the president who has become "radioactive" inside his own party, is toasted in the press as a political wise man.

Since when do the spoils go to the loser?

And do editors or producers at Newsweek or The Wall Street Journal or Fox News even broach the topic with Rove and ask him to pontificate, in print or on the air, about why the Republican Party that he helped shape for much of the last decade is now spiraling downward, and why Bush has made history as the most disliked president ever to sit in the Oval Office? Or do news executives not want to highlight to their readers and viewers the fact that their vaunted political expert, whose insights are advertised as being so valuable, actually helped design the GOP's modern-day Edsel?

It makes no sense, but I can't say I'm surprised by the lack of reality that surrounds Rove and the glowing reviews he's collecting from the press.

It's simply a continuation of the gooey, ongoing crush the Beltway press has had on Rove, who for years was credited in the media for building the Republican Party into a sleek, hardball-playing, election-winning vessel that could out-race the dawdling Democrat boat with ease. Rove, the press cheered, had literally cracked the code to winning elections, and poor Democrats were powerless to slow down his juggernaut.

Forget that Bush has suffered a historic plummet in the polls, bottoming out at a depth never before measured with modern polling. None of that matters, because as MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell proclaimed

just last week, Rove "is a brilliant political tactician."

That has been the divined media narrative on Rove for years, and nothing will change it. Not even the fact that Republican pros now publicly admit the number one challenge facing the party come November is Bush's dismal standing among most Americans. "As the head figure of the Republican brand, President Bush continues to flounder," Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) wrote to his colleagues last week, stressing the political climate for Republicans "is the worst since Watergate."

The carnage come November could be historic, especially in the wake of the GOP's stunning Mississippi loss last week in the kind of congressional district Democrats don't even usually compete in, let alone win by eight points. The Republican Party spent more $1 million trying to salvage the race. As the Politico noted:

See more stories tagged with: media, karl rove, conflict of interest, don siegelman

A senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and a former senior writer for Salon, Boehlert's first book, "Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over for Bush," was published in May. He can be reached at eboehlert@aol.com

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