The manuscript of a new book on Sarah Palin by an ex-aide has stirred up a media mini-circus. But lost in the hoopla is the revelation that conservatives like Palin considered Fox News their media “surrogates”. Though unsurprising, the news is still disturbing. Coming on the heels of the network’s doctoring of news coverage on a presidential hopeful, the events have raised questions about who its anointed king is in the 2012 presidential election (only a romantic would think it could be a queen).

The leaked draft came from Frank Bailey, who was once in the inner circle of advisers to the former Alaskan governor. According to The Daily Caller, a murky conservative website, Baily calls himself a “Fox News conservative“. We will leave the reader to interpret that phrase.

More disturbingly, Bailey wrote that Palin’s team used what they called “Fox News surrogates” to destroy the reputations of anyone incurring Palin’s wrath.

Although the Fox News conservative was not even close to publishing the disparaging book on Palin, it has been well-known for sometime now that the hierarchies at Fox and the GOP are not very fond of the former governor as presidential material. What is new is the Fox attack on Ron Paul, a darling of the Tea Party movement, itself a creation of the media conglomerate.

Fox was caught faking footage, showing Ron Paul being booed after winning a straw poll at the CPAC convention, an annual conservatives’ mecca. In reality, attendees cheered wildly for the libertarian. Fox pulled the same trick it had done so often in the past, using footage from other events. In this case the clip came from last year’s convention, when Mitt Romney’s supporters had packed the room.

Ron Paul is a libertarian, who unlike Fox subscribes to the anti-government doctrine on both social and economic issues. He would not be as entertaining as the likes of Republican stalwarts on abortion, gay rights, and other cornerstones of the conservative movement, because he truly detests governmental interference in all aspects of society.

In other words, Ron Paul is not a Fox News conservative, and that is probably why the media conglomerate has set out to discredit him in the run-up to the 2012 election. Two are down; who will Fox allow to stand? Who is the Fox News Conservative among the presidential hopefuls?