Fox News host Greta Van Susteren ripped into Fox contributor Tucker Carlson Sunday for posting a report on his website, The Daily Caller, about Sarah Palin and her alleged relations with former basketball star Glen Rice. The report highlighted rapist and former boxer Mike Tyson’s disgraceful, explict remarks about Palin with the headline: “Mike Tyson: Sarah Palin met ‘the wombshifter.’” The post originally offered no condemnation or editorial comment on his remarks.

Susteren — a “chief defender” of Palin — called Carlson “a pig” for advertising such remarks on the front page. In a 900-word rebuke, Susteren suggested that such a “disgusting” post is not only “smut” but also “violence against women” and an inexcusable attempt to keep his failing website afloat:

I keep asking myself, why would Tucker allow this to be posted on his website? I am suspicous [sic] his website is not doing well and this is one quick last breath to create buzz to keep it afloat. I wish Tucker had not allowed this to be posted on a site associated with his name because Tucker and I have been friends (and even colleagues) for years. I have always liked Tucker and I assume you can tell that when I introduce him and greet him on air.

I don’t like it when I see that my friends do disgraceful things – but we need to start calling out even our friends to stop this. Tucker has daughters and a wife and I would think he in particular would not want to be a purveyer of smut (and this is actually more, this is violence against women) and allow this to be posted on his website. There is nothing funny about violence against women and repeating what a thug (I thought – even hoped – Tyson had outgrown that) says on a radio show is also not news. I know he loves his wife and children and would never want this said or reported about them….so why is it ok to report about another? This is not news.

Responding to Susteren, Carlson later added an editor’s note to the report, calling the remarks “offensive, indeed repulsive” but “newsworthy.” “Had Tyson used this language to attack virtually any other person in public life, he’d be vilified on the front page of the New York Times. But you won’t read these quotes in the Times,” he wrote. “We believe they deserve public scrutiny and condemnation.”

But perhaps Susteren is on to something when it comes to Carlson’s pleas for web-traffic. Using one’s face to censor parts of actress Scarlett Johansson’s naked photos is also a practice not usually found at the New York Times. But perhaps he just felt his ill-placed face deserves “public scrutiny.”

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has been sounding increasingly like she’s going to run for president lately, embarking on a high-profile bus tour this weekend and telling reporters she could beat President Obama. In Washington, D.C. yesterday, she “went out of her way to stress that there was plenty of time for someone — like her, perhaps? — to get into the race in the coming months.” “There will be more strong candidates jumping in,” she said. “The field isn’t set yet. Not by a long shot.”

Like many of the 2012 Republican candidates, Palin has been working for Fox News as a paid contributor. But unlike other candidates, she is still getting paid by the network, even after it ended its contracts with other potential candidates to maintain compliance with campaign finance laws. But when it announced that it was severing its deals with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, Fox said it would maintain its ties with Palin and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Huckabee has since announced he is not running, but Palin has only gotten closer to a bid. Yet Fox said last week that it is not changing its agreement with Palin. This has prompted many, including CNN’s John King, to wonder whether Fox is holding Palin to a different standard. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest Palin and Fox have a mutually beneficial relationship that the skirts the ethical guidelines it has imposed on other 2012 candidates.

On her ongoing “One Nation” bus tour, Palin has gone to great lengths to avoid the media. She gives no notice to reporters about where she is going, and was only found at the National Archives on Saturday after reporters happened to see tourists Tweeting about spotting her there. When she finally made herself available to the press last night, it lasted only three minutes and Palin’s daughter Piper “repeatedly tugged at her mother’s arm during the questions” asking her to leave. In Gettysburg this morning, Palin pulled a bait and switch by leaving her bus in a hotel parking lot to give the impression she was still inside while she quietly slipped out in a different vehicle to dupe reporters.

That is, however, “unless you’re Fox News host Greta Van Susteren or her husband, John Coale,” Politico reports.

While Palin has kept other reporters at arms length since her rise to prominence during the 2008 campaign, she has repeatedly let Van Susteren inside. Coale is one of “the figures charged with guiding Palin’s political image in Washington,” and helped start her leadership PAC. While Coale insists he is just a “friend,” The Washington Post reported, “Others familiar with Palin’s political team insist that Coale has far more power than he is letting on — essentially helping to run Sarah PAC.”

Meanwhile, Van Susteren was in Palin’s motorcade yesterday conducting an exclusive interview while other reporters desperately tried to follow her via Twitter sightings. And Van Susteren has a long history of airing fluffy pieces about Palin without disclosing her husband’s ties to the Tea Party darling. In August 2010, she aired what “basically boil[ed] down to a three-day infomercial of Palin” talking about Alaskan oil. Van Susteren also scored Palin’s first national television interview after the 2008 election; hosted a one-hour “documentary” on “Governor Sarah Palin — An American Woman;” and conducted an exclusive interview with Todd Palin, in which she grilled him “on everything from the story behind the name ‘First Dude’ to how he feels about the name ‘First Dude.’”

King said last night that he assumes Palin has secretly told Fox she is not running because of the glaring “double standard.” But Fox has repeatedly shown there is no reason to give it the benefit of the doubt when it comes to journalistic ethics.

Last night, Fox News aired the final part of its three-day special on oil drilling in Alaska, in which host Greta Van Susteren got the “inside story” from former governor Sarah Palin and her husband Todd. The special, shot on location, featured airplane flights over the tundra, boat rides in Valdez harbor, and interviews with the Palins on their dock. As Media Matters noted, the special “basically boil[ed] down to a three-day infomercial of Palin touting her positions on ANWR and her record of ‘play[ing] hardball’ with oil companies as governor.”

Indeed, while the special included numerous interviews with pro-drilling advocates — including the Palins and a vice president of Shell Oil — “The Case Against Drilling in ANWR” was reserved for last night, confined to an interview with Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA).

Watch a compilation:

Beyond the questionable seriousness of Van Susteren’s report, there is a deeper ethical concern. Van Susteren’s husband John Coale is one of “the figures charged with guiding Palin’s political image in Washington,” but Van Susteren never revealed this connection during the special. Coale has described himself as simply a “friend” of Palin, but has acknowledged that he helped her start her leadership PAC. “Others familiar with Palin’s political team insist that Coale has far more power than he is letting on — essentially helping to run Sarah PAC,” the Washington Post first reported.

Van Susteren admitted on her blog that her husband “has given Governor Palin advice and helped her,” but she said her husband is not a “paid adviser.” Still, according to a Nexis search performed by ThinkProgress, starting on the day that Sarah PAC was unveiled, Van Susteren has never disclosed her husband’s behind-the-scenes role on air.

The oil special is merely the latest in a long string of Van Susteren puff pieces about Palin. During the presidential campaign, Van Susteren had perhaps the best access to Palin of any journalist, hosting a one-hour “documentary” on “Governor Sarah Palin — An American Woman.” She also scored an exclusive interview with Todd Palin, in which she grilled him “on everything from the story behind the name ‘First Dude’ to how he feels about the name ‘First Dude.’”

After the election, Palin chose Van Susteren for her first national television interview. Since then, Van Susteren has consistently covered Palin, keeping an eye out for any potential slights to the governor and gushing over her popularity. For example, when Palin’s memoir came out, Van Susteren was a strong promoter of the book, devoting plenty of air time to the “buzz” surrounding its publication.

This week on Fox News, host Greta Van Susteren challenged Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) argument that Iraq should serve as a model for how the U.S. should stabilize Afghanistan. “But in Iraq, they at least had some form of government, you know, that was not so remotely dissimilar from our own,” Van Susteren asserted. “Afghanistan is a tribal area, where they have different tribes and different families. It’s a different — can we do that?” But McCain wouldn’t back down, suggesting that Afghanistan might be easier to pacify because violence was worse in Iraq at the height of the war there than it currently is in Afghanistan.

Last night talking with Newt Gingrich, Van Susteren scolded herself for disagreeing with McCain:

VAN SUSTEREN: Senator McCain said that I was wrong. And far be it for me to disagree with military policy and strategy with someone like Senator McCain, so I backed off. But they seem to have very different histories to me. [...]

Well, with Senator McCain’s distinguished military career and history, you know, the other option, too, is that my question was inartfully posed and that I didn’t make myself clear because I — you know, I don’t — I would never make the mistake of debating military policy and strategy with Senator McCain.

Watch it:

Van Susteren shouldn’t be so hard on herself. Although McCain appears to view an Iraq-like “surge” as a solution to every military problem, it is not entirely analogous to the current situation in Afghanistan. Indeed, as one administration official said when the White House was debating its new strategy, “We spent a lot of time discussing the fact that the only thing Iraq and Afghanistan have in common is a lot of sand.” And as the New York Times noted:

The Iraq surge worked in large part because there was powerful support in Anbar Province from the so-called Awakening. [...] But a series of intelligence reports supplied to Mr. Obama since September found no evidence in Afghanistan of anything on the scale of the Iraqi Awakening movement. What’s more, in Afghanistan the extremists, the Taliban, are natives.

Military commanders, experts, and even other conservatives have noted the “considerable” differences between pre-surge Iraq and Afghanistan today. Even Gingrich told Van Susteren last night, “Afghanistan must be probably 20 times more complex than Iraq.” “Using the Iraq strategy, may be one that may not be exactly applicable,” Charles Krauthammer said yesterday.

Given how wrong McCain has been on matters of foreign policy and national security in recent years, Van Susteren should have more faith in her ability to challenge him — and any other other lawmaker — on his views.

Last October, then-White House communications director Anita Dunn chastised Fox News, saying it operates as “either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” Yesterday in an interview with the New York Times, her successor, Dan Pfieffer, agreed. “I have the same view of Fox that Anita had which is that Fox is not a traditional news organization,” he said.

Pfieffer’s comment has sparked outrage with at least one Fox News host. Writing on her blog this morning, Greta Van Susteren challenged the White House to appear on her show to “prove” that it is not a traditional news program:

I challenge the White House to come on ON THE RECORD at 10pm and debate ME about ON THE RECORD at 10pm. If they are certain about their swipe (which includes ON THE RECORD at 10pm since they say all of Fox) – they should have the courage and strength to prove it. I am responsible for 10pm so I am eager to talk to them about our work at 10pm – an hour included in their swipe. I will be fair, polite but strong. I expect them to be the same. I will be armed with facts about ON THE RECORD at 10pm – not swipes.

But if Van Susteren is going to challenge anybody on the “fair and balanced” merits of her program, she may have to debate those at her own network. The New York Times reported that Fox itself doesn’t consider Van Susteren’s time slot — 10 p.m. on weekdays — to be “news”:

Fox argues that its news hours — 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays — are objective. The channel has taken pains recently to highlight its news programs, including the two hours led by Shepard Smith, its chief news anchor. And its daytime newscasts draw more viewers than CNN or MSNBC’s prime-time programs.

“[They’re] not news!,” Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart said reacting to the Times report at the time, adding, “This is according to Fox News! Those people, the ones featured in promos about how fair and balanced Fox News is are not news!”