Sarah Palin Returns to Fox News

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is rejoining Fox News as a contributor less than five months after declining the network’s offer to renew her contract. 

Palin will make her first return appearance on “Fox & Friends” next Monday. Internet pioneer Matt Drudge first reported the news on The Drudge Report.

“The Power of FOX News is unparalleled,” Palin said in a statement. “The role of FOX News in the important debates in our world is indispensable. I am pleased and proud to be rejoining Roger Ailes and the great people at FOX.”

Fox News chairman Roger Ailes said he hopes Palin “continues to speak her mind.”

“I’ve had several conversations with Governor Palin in the past few weeks about her rejoining FOX News as a contributor,” Ailes said. “I have great confidence in her and am pleased that she will once again add her commentary to our programming.”

In January, Palin declined Fox News’s offer to renew her contract. But because she has always been ahead of the curve in using social media to get her message out to the public, Palin’s influence did not diminish. Unlike establishment Republicans, Palin has never been ashamed of the conservative and Tea Party grassroots and has always embraced the conservative base. This was evident when Palin gave her first interview to Breitbart News in January after her separation from Fox News.

According to a Politico analysis, Palin “still garnered much of the same coverage in the first four months of this year as she did in 2012” without a Fox News contract:

From January 2012 to May 2012, Palin received 223 mentions in newspapers; 69 in Web-based publications, such as CNN.com, Washingtonpost.com, POLITICO and USNews.com; 563 in blogs; and her name appeared in 46 news transcripts, for a total of 901 mentions. During the same period this year, in her post-Fox News life, Palin’s still very much in the conversation, with 118 mentions in newspapers, 55 in Web-based publications, 726 in blogs and 12 in news transcripts, for a total of 911 mentions, and she also wrote an op-ed for the conservative website Breitbart.

The move will be mutually beneficial for both parties, for it once again merges the most dominant network in cable television with the most influential figure to Tea Party conservatives–who is also a guaranteed ratings draw. 

Palin is scheduled to address the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference on Saturday in Washington, D.C.