• On viewers distinguishing between objective reporting and opinion programming: “People who watch news are pretty smart. Most of them don’t just go to one channel for all their news anyway…[the majority of viewers] will select the place that’s the most comfortable, and they will retain the information they’re the most comfortable with. But undecideds, people who are smart, tend to float around, look, listen…They’re very perceptive.”

• On the White House agreeing to make the President available for an interview with Bret Baier last week: “Look, they understand the game…They did the right thing, and we respect them for it.”

• On former New York Times editor Howell Raines‘s recent assertion in the Washington Post: “Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration”?

“That’s hysterical,” Ailes tells Rosenthal. “Fox has taken more incoming; we have a bigger bull’s-eye on us than anybody. What he’s upset about is we haven’t been hit.”

• About the possibility of Fox signing Conan O’Brien, and the potential price tag: “We all like Conan…It’s an arithmetic problem.”

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BROKAW: You’re now at Fox News. Do you think that Fox News is fair to President Obama?

ROVE: I think they– on the news side, absolutely. I think that they’ve got first rate individuals at the White House who– do their job. And in an objective fair, and balanced way, yeah, absolutely.

Rove’s comments come on the heels of Friday’s WashingtonPost.com Op-Ed from former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines who wrote that FNC founder and chairman Roger Ailes is “using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration.”

Raines’ commentary had Fox News hosts firing back. Bill O’Reilly here and Greta Van Susteren here.

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Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations … My great fear, however, is that some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox’s financial power and expanding audience, as well as Ailes’s proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him.

A Fox News spokesperson responds to TVNewser, “We find it ironic that Howell is dispensing advice to other journalists after he nearly single-handedly destroyed the journalistic credibility of the New York Times.” (RE: This)

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