Republican strategist Karl Rove is encouraging Americans to support massive National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs because fictional police officers monitor phone calls on television dramas.

"If you don't like this program, which we now know was accessed 300 times last year, then you've got to be against local law enforcement being able to access routinely business records of the telephone company in their local investigations as well," Rove told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday.

"You cannot turn on a cop drama on television where there is not somebody who's pinging somebody's cell phone or taking a look at the phone calls made from some landline or telephone booth to help solve some crime on television," he added. "And it is routinely done in a large scale at the local law enforcement level."

Rove argued that the NSA program "requires a warrant to be able to search the record of any American."

"That's not what happens with local law enforcement, which can simply get a phone company to run a trace on a phone or give you the connection of a phone number," he insisted. "How many times have we sent the police to that hotel on Route 1 because we searched that phone record? You gotta be consistent."