On Tuesday night, Sarah Palin was given the honor of being a guest on Jay Leno’s second night back to the “Tonight Show.” Considering the fact that she is often the punchline in late-night television monologues, she did — by most accounts — a pretty good job, providing viewers with a glimpse at the lighter, less serious side of herself.

But one joke still flew over most people’s heads. During her interview with Leno, Palin said, “Those few years ago when I was still in journalism, it was all about the who, what, when, where and why. It was not so much the opinion interjected into hard news stories ... That’s why I joined FOX.”

The acronym LMFAO should immediately pop to mind, because if that statement wasn’t meant to be a joke, then it indicates sheer stupidity at best and disingenuous at worst.

FOX News is often accused of having a conservative slant — this should come as a surprise to no one. Even Bill O’Reilly, host of the hit opinion show “The O’Reilly Factor,” has admitted that FOX is, for the most part, a conservative news source. With the primetime occupied by conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren, one must have a totally different definition of the word “conservative” to think otherwise.

FOX News executives like to make the argument that those commentators aren’t a part of FOX News’ “news” programming, but instead operate out of FOX News’ “opinion” programming. But, as investigative journalist and comedian Jon Stewart pointed out on his Comedy Central show on Wednesday night, the ideological balance of news programming is heavily tilted to the right.

Stewart used clips of FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly, who used poll numbers in support of scrapping health-care reform, while stating poll numbers showing Barack Obama’s 2008 election win didn’t really mean anything just months earlier — making the point that poll numbers could mean nothing or everything, depending on your opinion on what the news should be.

Liberals such as Stewart should not hold a grudge against FOX News executives. Like all good corporate leaders, they realize that their jobs aren’t actually to inform the public. Instead, their jobs are to make profits for their shareholders and for News Corp, FOX News’ umbrella corporation. This means entertaining the public — thus increasing their TV viewership ratings — and promoting their other businesses to the public during their daily programming.

One such business is Sarah Palin, Inc. Palin’s book, Going Rogue, was published by the News Corp-owned publishing house HarperCollins. HarperCollins and its parent company, News Corp, both profit from every copy of Palin’s book that is sold — promoting both Palin and her conservative ideology is only in News Corp’s best interest.

This presents a discrepancy between the good, clean journalism that Palin discussed with Leno on Tuesday and News Corp’s corporate financial interests. Being a corporation, its decisions should always fall on the side of the business interests. In this case, FOX News ought to consider changing it’s slogan from “Fair and Balanced” to “Nothing Personal, Just Business.”

In January, Palin signed on as a contributor for FOX News. Although it would be wrong to assume that her reasons were anything but journalistically pure, one cannot help but notice the clear conflict of interest. Even so, every night millions of Americans will still tune in to FOX News (or would it be more aptly named FOX Opinion?) to listen to the “Thrilla from Wasilla” for 15 minutes — and opinion television hosts like Hannity discuss her like she’s representative of the Second Coming of the Messiah Ronald Reagan.

Liberals will scream about how stupid both Palin and FOX News are — Palin for what she spews almost unthinkingly and FOX for giving her the airtime to do so. But in the end their criticisms are futile, because those 15 minutes might be the most profitable 15 minutes of News Corp’s day.

Asst. Editorials Editor James Sunshine is College freshman from Boca Raton, Fla.