Politico vs. FNC: Round 3…

It’s the spat that doesn’t seem to want to end. The latest shot comes from Politico’s Jim VandeHei and Jonathan Martin…

Fox News has been making a serious charge about mainstream political reporters: They hate Sarah Palin.

This is not just wrong, it’s absurd. The reality is exactly the opposite: We love Palin.

And if Palin does not exactly love us, she’s smart enough to recognize how quickly reporters devour every provocative remark she utters. She knows how to exploit our weakness to guarantee herself exposure far out of proportion to her actual influence in Republican politics.

It’s a tangled, symbiotic affair — built on mutual dependency and mutual enabling.

For the media, Palin is great at the box office. Among modern American political figures, she is second only to Barack Obama in generating clicks (for Web sites such as this one) and ratings (for the cable news networks hungering around the clock for fresh material).

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