For months, a rumor has been circulating among TV news insiders in Washington, D.C., and New York that Brit Hume, Fox News Channel's managing editor in Washington and host of prime-time hour Special Report, has been having an extramarital affair with a younger colleague. The object of his alleged attentions: Megyn Kendall, a general-assignment correspondent who has been with the network since 2004.
There is no evidence to suggest that the rumors are true. Of the half-dozen sources who relayed the allegation to Radar, none could claim first-hand knowledge, and several Fox insiders said they believed it to be false. Still, the whispers have grown so loud that Hume and Kendall have been forced to deny them repeatedly to curious colleagues. (One Fox source said Hume seemed genuinely amused and somewhat flattered to be linked by gossip to the attractive and much younger Kendall.) A Fox spokesperson also flatly denied it, and suggested it was being "shopped around" by enemies of the network.
And while that might sound like paranoia, at least one such enemy does exist: publicist Paul Schur, a former Fox spokesman whose job it was to burnish Hume's image just months ago.
Last month, Schur, who worked with both Hume and Kendall in Fox's Washington bureau until he left the network in August, anonymously edited the gossip into Kendall's Wikipedia entry, inserting this claim: "There are many rumors that Kendall has a very 'special' relationship with managing editor Brit Hume, the reason for her plum assignments at Fox News." Radar was alerted to the Wikipedia entry by an anonymous e-mail sent in late December. Wikipedia keeps track of the IP address of each user who changes an entry; when Radar became suspicious that Schur was behind the change to Kendall's entry, a reporter sent him an e-mail with a link to a website maintained by a Radar staffer. When Schur visited the site, his computer's IP address was logged by the site's tracking software, and it matched the IP address of the Wikipedia user that inserted the rumor in Kendall's entry. (The offending sentence has since been deleted.)