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.)

Asked whether he had changed the Wikipedia entry or otherwise retailed the rumor, Schur declined to comment. Told of Schur's involvement, Fox's spokesperson said, "If it's true, it's unfortunate he has resorted to this."

It's unclear why Schur left Fox News; insiders described his departure as abrupt and unexplained, suggesting that he may have been trying to exact vengeance on his former employer. Whatever the reason, it's ironic that Fox, which has a notoriously ferocious and loyal PR shop, has been attacked by one of its own.

To be sure, in promoting the rumor of a Hume-Kendall tryst, Schur had help from reality. Hume's wife of 13 years, Kim Schiller Hume, headed the Washington bureau until recently; a report in the New York Daily News suggested that marital tensions had played a large role in her departure. Kendall, meanwhile, is recently divorced. As of today, in fact, she is reverting to her maiden name, Megyn Kelly, for on-air use.

Moreover, getting involved with an underling is virtually par for the course for Fox higher-ups. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of FNC parent News Corp., embarked on an affair with his current wife, Wendi Deng, when she was an employee of the Star TV affiliate, and married her in 1999. Roger Ailes, now chairman of Fox Television Stations, divorced his second wife, Norma, in 1995 and went onto marry his current wife, Beth Tilson, who had been his second-in-command at America's Talking. And star pundit Bill O'Reilly famously described elaborate sexual fantasies over the phone to one of his producers, Andrea Mackris, leading to a harassment allegations and a settlement of undisclosed size (reportedly around $2 million).

Then again, the fact of an extramarital relationship would sit uncomfortably with many of Hume's past pronouncements. Hume launched Special Report in 1998 to capitalize on the then-unfolding Monica Lewinsky scandal, and he frequently criticized President Clinton's conduct.

In August 2001, discussing the Gary Condit scandal on Fox News Sunday, he mused hopefully, "One of the things that might conceivably come out of this, coupled with the Clinton embarrassments, is a return to an idea that certain kinds of private behavior, be it private or not, are not acceptable. Is it not likely to be, or possible, that the old idea of marital fidelity will come back into vogue among politicians and here in this city, and that marital infidelity, especially with interns, will be thought of as taboo or perhaps even forbidden?"

As for Kendall, it's safe to say that if she has unprofessional feelings to conceal, she's not doing a very good job of it. When, in a July interview with FishbowlDC, she was asked to name her favorite working journalist, she said, "Brit Hume. The man truly knows everything about everything."

Later, in the same Q&A, Kendall was asked which of the seven deadly sins she most resembled. She answered, "Lust."