Fox & Friends has waged an unlikely and often bizarre campaign to discredit Politico, even to the point of stooping to broadcast anonymous Politico reader comments critical of a post on Fox News chairman Roger Ailes. Largely, however, Fox & Friends' effort to attack Politico has been to attempt to assign a left-wing bias to its reporting. This morning, guest host Eric Bolling continued this effort by hosting Jeff Poor of the conservative website The Daily Caller to claim that Politico's reporting on allegations of sexual harassment against Herman Cain definitively demonstrated that Politico “leans left, but they keep denying it.”

Poor claimed that Politico ran 138 Cain-related stories over the course of a week, while devoting less coverage to “other high-profile stories ... like Fast and Furious and the Solyndra scandal.” More evidence presented over the course of the segment was that Jonathan Martin, a reporter at Politico, and Betsy Fischer, executive producer of NBC's Meet the Press, are engaged, or as Bolling put it, “If I'm not mistaken, Jonathan Martin -- they call him Mr. Betsy Fischer.”

Fox & Friends also aired the following on-screen graphic to illustrate the connection between MSNBC and Politico:

But if Politico's reporting on the Cain scandal reveals its left-wing bias, as Bolling and Poor claim, what does that say about Fox News?

Since the story broke a few weeks ago, Fox has engaged in a nonstop campaign to limit the damage to the GOP presidential candidate by primarily operating on a number of fronts: diminishing the sexual harassment allegations as meaningless; congratulating Cain on his denial of the allegations; baselessly claiming that Cain is being targeted because he's a black conservative; and attacking his accuser. Fox News' Dick Morris even said of one Cain accuser: “I look forward to her spread in Playboy.”

Politico may have run a number of stories about the Cain sexual harassment cases, but not only is it a major story about a prominent presidential candidate, Politico broke the news itself. It just makes sense that it would want to call attention to its exclusive and be the one to report on breaking details. Fox's clear effort to shield Cain from damage, no matter how low they have to stoop, is far more revealing of the network's political bias.