BuzzFeed, the New York Times, The Washington Post and the rest of the field have reported extensively on this dynamic.

And last night, another important source of campaign news — Megyn Kelly’s own prime-time show on Fox News — covered it as well. “Donald Trump, with all due respect to my friend at 10:00, will go on ‘Hannity’ and pretty much only ‘Hannity’ and will not venture out to the unsafe spaces these days,” said the host in a segment with Stuart Stevens, a strategist who worked on the Mitt Romney campaign. Nor were those remarks an out-of-the-blue, impolitic slam on a colleague. Just before uttering that point, Kelly ripped into Hillary Clinton for pursuing a similar self-sheltering policy: “Now they’re both in their own version of a presidential protection program … They’ve designed her situation so she’s not in a place where she’s feels uncomfortable … which is why she sat for a half an hour with Mary J. Blige the singer, which is why she did Entertainment Tonight this evening, which is why we just found out that when she went on the ‘Steve Harvey’ show, she had every single question given to her in writing in advance and then she feigned surprise as the questions were asked.”

The approaches for both candidates, said Kelly, don’t “expand the tent for either one of them.”

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That was actual “fair and balanced” coverage. Yet Hannity didn’t take kindly to Kelly’s mainstream analysis of his own shilling for Donald Trump.

He elaborated a bit:

What’s up with this guy Hannity? On the one hand, he makes no apologies for his support of Trump. “The difference between me and you is I’m honest,” the host told the Erik Wemple Blog a few weeks ago. Which is to say — he doesn’t hide that he’s a conservative or that he supports Trump. Confronted about crossing the line into sheer advocacy, Hannity has said he’s not a journalist. “If I’m interviewing Hillary Clinton, it’s gonna be a hundred times harder than any Republican because I believe the Republicans represent and have a far better vision — one that I agree with — I just have less disagreement with them. I’m not a journalist. I’m a talk-show host,” said Hannity back in April.

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And on the other hand, he unfurls his Twitter outrage when a colleague politely says the very same thing. As for the claim that Kelly is a Clinton supporter, clearly Hannity hasn’t watched her program.

TV host psychology aside, Donald Trump is hereby devouring Fox News. This is an outlet that has thrived by offering a variety of programming strains, the better to build out its own expansive tent. It gives its early-morning viewers a mix of lifestyle chatter, hard-right politics and pure idiocy every day on “Fox & Friends.” Midday programs range from hard news with a conservative accent to the ill-conceived “Outnumbered,” a semicircular couch setup radiating a range of views. Evening hours, likewise, hop around the sensibility spectrum, with “Special Report” doing hard news — and delivering a fair amount of Trump skepticism — “The Kelly File” holding both major-party presidential candidates to account, and “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Hannity” both cheering on the disastrous GOP nominee, though with different styles.

A man not known for subtlety, Trump has exploited these divisions. He appears frequently on “Fox & Friends,” “Hannity” and “The O’Reilly Factor,” and never on “The Kelly File.” The situation has to be eating away at Kelly. Think back to August 2015, when she committed the wonderful journalistic act of pressing Trump on his history of sexist statements at the first GOP primary debate. After that, Trump went on a months-long unhinged rant against her — and the entirety of Fox News. He called her a “third rate” broadcaster, “crazy” and “lightweight,” and his followers took his cue to harass Kelly. In spring 2016, she attempted to broker a peace accord, inviting Trump for a soft-focus interview on Fox Broadcasting Co. Instead of nailing Trump to the wall for all his awfulness, Kelly treated him like an old pal. It was terrible.

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The strategy didn’t work, either: The idea was to do the special on Fox Broadcasting and then secure access to Trump for perhaps more rough-and-tumble interviews on “The Kelly File.” That latter part never worked out, as Trump has stiff-armed Kelly in favor of Hannity, O’Reilly and those embarrassments on “Fox & Friends.” She got played by the GOP nominee. Why deal with the super-smart and super-tough Megyn Kelly when you can reach essentially the same audience by interviewing with all of her pushover colleagues? There’s simply no point!

The Erik Wemple Blog has made numerous requests to Fox News on this very topic. The network has declined to comment or to make Kelly available. The Trump campaign also hasn’t helped.

The situation cannot last. It’s unfair to Kelly that a fellow like Trump can manipulate a news network to avoid her scrutiny. And it’s unconscionable that Hannity has so blithely trampled the industry’s ethics code in procuring interview after interview with Trump. The I’m-not-a-journalist dodges excuse nothing: Fox News can’t require one set of standards for certain programs while exempting “Hannity.” If the network is really serious about Hannity’s talk-show claim, it should take the “Fox News” box out of the lower- right left corner of the screen during his program. Last we checked, it was still there: