Fox News has been making a serious charge about mainstream political reporters: They hate Sarah Palin.

This is not just wrong, it’s absurd. The reality is exactly the opposite: We love Palin.

And if Palin does not exactly love us, she’s smart enough to recognize how quickly reporters devour every provocative remark she utters. She knows how to exploit our weakness to guarantee herself exposure far out of proportion to her actual influence in Republican politics.

It’s a tangled, symbiotic affair — built on mutual dependency and mutual enabling.

For the media, Palin is great at the box office. Among modern American political figures, she is second only to Barack Obama in generating clicks (for Web sites such as this one) and ratings (for the cable news networks hungering around the clock for fresh material).

For Palin, the benefit is the exposure she needs to maintain her public profile and stir up chatter about a potential presidential candidacy — both of which help her continue to rake in millions of dollars in speaking fees. She also gets a villain with which to further energize her supporters: The more she convinces them “the MSM” hates her, the more they love her.

The problem is that this relationship — what in Hollywood they call being “frenemies” — treats Palin as though she were the central figure in the politics of 2012. No realistic appraisal of Palin’s current strengths and weaknesses or of the history of Republican politics suggests that this is necessarily true.

A new poll out Thursday should make those of us in the media take a look in the mirror and ask: Should we really be giving so much attention to somebody who faces so many hurdles to becoming president or even the GOP nominee in 2012?

According to the Washington Post/ABC survey, she is viewed favorably by 37 percent of Americans, while 55 percent view her unfavorably. That’s what pollsters call being “upside down,” which for an incumbent would usually spell defeat.

Furthermore, only a quarter of those polled said Palin was qualified to be president — and 71 percent said she was not.

What’s more, 52 percent of self-identified Republicans — more than half — said she wasn’t qualified to be president.

Similar polls of Republicans don’t place her first nationally. At this early stage of the race, it's the "undecided" option that polls highest.

Also still strong is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Remember him? You wouldn’t know it from the coverage, but some Republicans still prefer him to Palin. Take a recent poll of Republicans in Alabama, a deeply conservative state where Palin should be strong. Huckabee leads her by 10 percentage points there.

Beyond polls, consider this: If Palin were to announce a bid for the White House, how many party officials would support her? Would a single governor or senator get behind her candidacy? More than 10 House members? And how about donors — how many of the bundlers who seeded President Bush’s two campaigns would do the same for her?

Before you can scream “but those are just elites!” recall the traditions of the GOP. Yes, she could mount an insurgency and run against the power brokers in Washington and the state capitals who traditionally control the nominating process. But has that ever happened in the modern history of the Republican Party? Just ask Presidents Huckabee (2008) McCain (2000), Buchanan (’92 and ’96) and Robertson (’88).