Yes, I know… the initial breaking news came from the Hollywood Reporter, so you’re forgiven if you were a bit skeptical at first. But don’t blame us… Business Insider picked it up and Politico jumped on the bandwagon. It would appear that Fox Television Studios – not to be confused with Fox News – has decided to pass on producing the Hillary Spectacular Pre-election Coronation Festival.

The tantalizing spectacle of Fox Television Studios producing a Hillary Clinton miniseries for NBC has been canceled, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. It was reported last week that Fox, also the home of the cable news channel with conservative-leaning programs, might produce the planned four-hour miniseries to be written and directed by Courtney Hunt (Frozen River) and to star Diane Lane… But a source at Fox says the negotiation fell apart over deal points more than any potential fallout. Fox TV Studios did not respond to a request for comment. NBC declined comment.

Allahpundit took a so what attitude toward the whole thing yesterday, but it’s hard to blow this off as nothing more than a shift in the media breeze. Plenty of good points have been made in favor of keeping the GOP debates off network news entirely – unless it was on CNN with only Jake Tapper moderating – but that doesn’t seem terribly realistic. The most enthusiastic members of the base on both sides will, without question, chase the debates to an online forum, or even to CSPAN, but we already know who they will be voting for. There are still a lot of folks without a predestined decision who may need to be smacked in the face with something that disrupts the latest re-run of The Big Bang Theory. Negotiations on moderators and formats could stop some of the bleeding from the usual MSM freak show, but a wider outlet – at least for a couple of outings – could still prove valuable.

But what does this alleged Fox decision say about the ongoing debate? From the beginning, NBC was maintaining that their entertainment division had nothing to do with NBC News, and most certainly was in no way related to MSNBC. Perish the thought. CNN had a bit tougher row to hoe, but they do enough documentary style shows to claim that it was a biography. Allahpundit already made the case that ABC was the home base of one of the worst offenders (GS) and the Tiffany Network didn’t have much of a claim to make on the impartiality front either. But Fox TV airs shows which run the full spectrum and offend or please pretty much anyone at one point or another.

By backing out of this, it looks like a tacit admission that the home of the Simpsons, Family Guy and House really is locked at the hip with Fox News. And that only gives cover to NBC News to make the entire argument look silly. Under the covers, of course, Fox may have looked at the proposal and found that a Hillary biopic would put people to sleep faster than Ed Schultz crowing over how he lost two and a half pounds last year, but the political machine will spin it as a confession. Maybe we should have waited for the script to be written before anyone made any decisions?