Sean Hannity's finger-pointing over the mainstream media' having "completely ignored" Barack Obama's "outrageous comments" in 2007 raises an obvious question: If this is such big news that the failure to report it is, as Hannity said last night, "further proof that the mainstream media has been in the pocket of Barack Obama since the day that he arrived on the national stage," then where was Fox News? How did it miss this big news only until now, when the Daily Caller website did its work for it? If Hannity's accusation is correct, then either Fox is also "in the pocket of Barack Obama" or monumentally inept. Or they reported the story and it's just not that big a deal. Hint: select Option C.

As Erik Wemple notes in a great piece in the Washington Post, Fox showed video of this speech on Special Report with Brit Hume in June, 2007. If it missed the "important" parts how so? And if it didn't, why did the "fair and balanced" network sit on them? Wemple writes:

What we have here is a delicious slice of pie — i.e., Hannity and Fox being part of a conspiracy alleged by Hannity and Fox. It would be ripe material for a Fox News Public Editor, if only such an individual existed. How could the network that constantly crows about the media’s failure to vet Barack Obama so clearly fail to vet Barack Obama?

The failures and hypocrisy would be forgivable if not for the $1 billion. That’s Fox News’s profit expectations for this year. Any news organization that makes a billion dollars in profits needs to be careful about slighting other media outlets for failing to adequately cover any story. If Fox wants Obama vetted to its satisfaction, it need only commit a small fraction of those profits to an investigative team of Barack Obama vetters. That way, it wouldn’t any longer need to rely on pipsqueaks like the Daily Caller and Breitbart.com to supply its alleged ”bombshells.”

Yet instead of looking inward, Fox looks outward, pointing blame at the Associated Press and at the Daily Press, “serving Hampton Roads, Va.” Such a sliming operation by a billion-dollar network against a regional newspaper could be called shameful, but when you’re talking about Fox, it’s so easy to overuse that word.

Hannity frequently boasts (and he did so again last night) about his March, 2007 interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright that was supposedly an early warning - also ignored by the media - of the radical, racist nature of Obama's pastor and, by extension, Obama. So why didn't Hannity and/or Fox News reporters investigate a speech Obama made to black clergy, where Wright was in attendance, three months later? It's not as though Fox has ever been shy about making racial insinuations against Obama.

There's only one plausible answer: that there's no "there" there.