NYT Prints Another Lie

"MSNBC Star." Or is it not a lie if it's an oxymoron?

This article is virtually the definition of damning with faint praise:

...That growth, while coming from a base that Fox News would find disastrously puny, is demonstrable, especially among the group that is chiefly sold to news advertisers: people between the ages of 25 and 54. For the last quarter, Mr. Olbermann, who is 47, has seen his ratings in that group grow by more than 30 percent.

The growth has not been unfailingly steady, as competitors at Fox and CNN pointed out. They noted that Mr. Olbermann did better in February and March than he has since. Still, for the year, Mr. Olbermann has managed to climb past CNN into second place in the news channel competition at 8 p.m. among that 25-to-54 group. That qualifies as a feat for MSNBC, though Mr. Olbermann’s show remains little more than a dot in the rearview mirror of Fox News.

...Mr. Olbermann thinks he knows one reason behind his gains. He believes that Mr. O’Reilly’s audience, which is still huge, is aging. He noted that Mr. O’Reilly’s total viewer ratings are basically flat, while his numbers in the younger audience group have been dropping — down about 15 percent for the last quarter. “There is no other conclusion to draw than he is not adding younger viewers,” Mr. Olbermann said.

Of course, in terms of numbers of viewers in that younger age group, Mr. O’Reilly is still playing in another league, with about three times as many as Mr. Olbermann. But that does represent a small slice of the total audience for Mr. O’Reilly.

That last line may be the best of the article, 'sure O'Reilly has 3 times the young viewers of Olbermann, but that's balanced out by the fact that he has 10 times the audience in other groups!'

Mr. Olbermann said, “People who didn’t like what I was doing would call and say: ‘Is this guy a jackass or what?’ You can tailor what you’re doing or saying to other people’s expectations, but you’re going to wind up acting.” He freely admitted, “The reaction of the audience has not been paramount with me.”

So you're TRYING to get ratings like this? This isn't golf, Keith; it's more like bowling. You want HIGH numbers.

“The country gave this president every imaginable benefit of the doubt,” he said, about the period following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. “He abused it. You know what Lincoln said: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of time. But it looks like you can’t fool all of the viewers all of the time, endlessly.”

To that I'll just say, does Keith know that 'all the viewers' means more than 50 people?

Perhaps I'm taking this piece the wrong way. Perhaps I should follow the Keith model, and note that since day 1 of this blog with 3 page views, my growth curve puts that of Instapundit and DailyKos to shame! I'm sure it's not long before they see me in their rear view mirrors.

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