Figures Don’t Lie, But Liars Figure

It seems hard to believe that anyone would give credence to the word of a discredited liar like Eric Boehlert, but Fox Haters are not picky. Boehlert’s latest disinformation campaign centers on Glenn Beck’s ratings. He began with a duplicitous claim (based on data analysis from that paragon of objectivity, the Daily Kos):

With the show's ratings heading south this spring, will the summer of 2010 set even more ratings lows for the star talker?

Dan Abrams’s site exposed the sleight-of-hand in Boehlert’s carefully-selected statistics, and it should surprise no one that the truth was almost exactly 180 degrees opposite from Boehlert’s boehloney:

Beck is on his way to his best summer ever...

Indeed, as the month of May progressed Beck noted on air that his ratings went up, not down. Boehlert wasn’t going to stand for any of that, so it was back to the keyboard for a retort, cross posted by the ever-accomodating folks at HuffPo:

Glenn Beck Can't Spin The Facts: His TV Ratings Are Down, A Lot

Buried in all of Eric’s surplusage comparing disparate months (January and May) along with some of the same trickery already exposed by Mediaite, one finds this deep in the column:

What if you factored out the poorly rated Saturday shows from May 2009? In that scenario, Beck's audience has grown more like 8 percent, May-to-May.

Well that’s pretty clear. Beck’s audience is up 8%, and that means his ratings are “down a lot”. Or something. But Boehlert isn’t through yet. The May ratings period just concluded, and that gave him another opportunity to misinform:

Remember how Beck insisted his ratings were actually up in the month of May? (Which turned out to be a bogus claim.) Well, I can't wait to hear this latest spin because there's yet another batch of Nielsen numbers and they continue to tell the same story: Glenn Beck is in a ratings free fall...Also on the decline was FNC’s Glenn Beck, which [h]as lost -26% of its total viewer audience and -23% in the demo.

Now mind you, Boehlert didn’t make those numbers up. He had a reliable source: a publicity release from a CNN flack! What is it Eric isn’t telling us about that press release? Let’s look a little more closely:

The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer is up year-over-year...In addition, CNN’s two flagship Sunday shows, State of the Union with Candy Crowley and GPS Fareed Zakaria grew double-digits compared to a year ago.

Now compare that with the portion referring to Fox and Glenn Beck:

FNC declines were also substantial when comparing May to the [sic] their recent peak at beginning of the year (January 2010)...Also on the decline was FNC’s Glenn Beck, which as lost -26% of its total viewer audience and -23% in the demo.

Did you catch that? CNN trumpets its shows’ audience year-to-year (the only accurate measurement because cable news viewership varies greatly from month to month), but with Fox and Glenn Beck the standard suddenly changes. It’s not year-to-year. All of a sudden it’s May compared “to their recent peak” in January! How clever. Any programming period will show fewer viewers if you compare it to the program’s “peak”. That’s kind of like the definition of a “peak”. So what is the truth about Beck’s May ratings? Before the big reveal, let’s recall Boehlert’s words:

Remember how Beck insisted his ratings were actually up in the month of May? (Which turned out to be a bogus claim.)

TVNewser has the year-to-year report:

At 5 p.m. "Glenn Beck" was up +10% in total viewers and 25% in the demo, while at 6 p.m. "Special Report with Bret Baier" was up +8% in total viewers and +6% in the demo.

Eric Boehlert, caught lying yet again. Shocker. We don’t have the time or the inclination to list the dozens of sites that parroted Boehlert’s lies, never revealing that his numbers came from a CNN PR flack, or that Beck in fact posted hefty increases in May. When the truth conflicts with a smear, print the smear.

The Loony Bin

Yeah, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but we haven’t stopped by the sanitarium lately, so we thought we’d drop in for a visit at o’reillysucks.com. We had to scroll past nearly a half-dozen posts about “Republican hypocrisy”, Bush and torture, and some state senator in South Carolina before we actually got to one about The O’Reilly Factor. The sucksters’ take on Friday’s Factor was most illuminating, in a way they probably didn’t intend. For example:

Then Dumbest Things of the Week with Greg Gutfeld and Juliet Huddy, two of the dumbest people at Fox.... Ingraham nominated Paul McCartney, for saying Bush was not very smart, when he is right, Bush was not very smart, and he proved it every time he opened his mouth.... All three of them agreed it was the dumbest thing of the week, they spent the entire segment talking about it, and slamming McCartney for it.

First of all, Ingraham didn’t nominate anyone for anything. What’s more, they didn’t “spend the entire segment talking about it”. In fact, the entire second half of the segment was about huggies diapers. How is it possible to make that sort of mistake? But wait, there’s more:

And finally Ingraham had the Republican country star Larry Gatlin on to smear President Obama, who he hates with a passion.... Then Ingraham told him not to worry because this November Obama is going to lose... O'Reilly and Ingraham both say all the Hollywood liberals are pinheads that nobody should listen to, because they know nothing about politics. Then Ingraham puts a lame country music singer on to discuss politics.... Gatlin is just a know-nothing country western singer, he can probably barely spell politics.

Unfortunately, Ingraham didn’t bring Larry Gatlin on, and she never told him not to worry. The Gatlin segment was taped earlier, and it was with O’Reilly, not Ingraham. Are the sucksters really unable to tell them apart? It’s almost like they “review” these programs without bothering to watch them. But that couldn’t be, could it?

The Truth Is Just a Thing of the Past

You have to hand it to the newshounds. They can get on their high horse and sermonize about “whispers and rumors” of tabloid stories, comparing Fox News to the National Enquirer. They’ll rail against “unsubstantiated allegations” and “character assassination”. And then they’ll turn around and smear people with reckless abandon, like they did to John Gibson and Megyn Kelly. And now Gretchen Carlson. Priscilla pens a vitriolic diatribe:

Fox & Friends Attack Gallery Owner Over “Sacrilegious” Art Exhibit

The headline, of course, is another lie. There were no attacks on the gallery owner. The only real attack was from Prissy who, apropos of nothing at all, tossed in a stinkbomb aimed directly at Gretchen Carlson:

This is the same gal who, allegedly, had an affair with a news anchor at the Richmond TV station where she was a reporter.

Isn’t that charming? Just what the doctor ordered: some whispers and rumors, a juicy bit of unsubstantiated character assassination. And all made perfectly respectable via one word: allegedly. But then what else would we expect from Priscilla, who hides behind a phony name so no one will know what an unqualified hack she is. Allegedly. Someone who attacks other people’s beliefs and delights in spreading rumors about their personal lives, overcompensating with interpersonal sadism. Allegedly. See how that works?

It is of course Ellen Brodsky who permits this sort of sewage, and even encourages it. After all, several of her hounds have left the kennel for greener pastures, and using sock puppets to inflate the numbers of commenters (allegedly) only works for so long. Maybe trucking in personal dirt and rumor-mongering will be the new magic key to get the newshounds back on the map. That’s going to take time away from Brodsky’s other obsession, the one where she scours the internet for any mention of this website:

I also intend to post comments about his character on every other blog that cites him.

Obsess much? In her latest broadside she writes:

if you read Johnny Dollar/Mark Koldys then I'm sure you'll want to know the other side of his nit-picking distortions.... My response to J$'s hysteria when a News Hounds blogger referred to Fox News' written version of Glenn Beck's column that appeared on the air, written up in transcript form, as an "official transcript." You see, Fox News didn't call it a transcript and it wasn't prepared by their "official" transcript service. That makes News Hounds liars.

Yes, if you claim that Fox published an inaccurate, doctored transcript, and point not to the actual published transcript, but to a column that wasn’t a transcript at all...yes, that makes you a liar. And by the way, the newspoodles are still recycling this lie. In discussing a segment with Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly (from May 11), Prissy complains that the “transcript” was altered. Only she doesn’t point to a transcript of the segment, but to an O’Reilly Talking Points Memo from four days later! How many times are you going to pull this and claim it’s not a lie?

Brodsky continues:

My own feeling is that J$'s would be better served and learn more if he were to undergo psychiatric evaluation for his manic, blind obsession with News Hounds, especially me (until recently, he had a photo of me posted on the front page of his site) than from his "Aha! I found a misplaced comma!" brand of "fact checking."

Ah, the personal attack. See? Prissy and Ellen really are on the same page. Allegedly. We’re not sure what the “misplaced comma” reference is all about. We did a search and found one entry where we took issue with the biased beagles involving a comma. That would’ve been where the bassets cut off a quote after a comma, so they could lie about Elizabeth Edwards being mentioned. So typical. So like Ellen’s other documented lies.

And what is the hang-up over her photo? It’s almost like Brodsky is disappointed that her photo was taken down, robbing her of her Queen Bee status. Allegedly. Aw Ellen, for old times’ sake, this is for you. If that doesn’t mollify you, then you can always go back to the personal attacks and smears. Remember your claim about our being arrested and having a criminal record? Hmm, that didn’t work out so well, did it? No matter, once that rumor spreads, the truth is just a thing of the past: the new motto of the newshounds.

Spot something you’d like to see in the next Fox Haters Week in Review? Send us an email.

Tags: mediamatters, huffpo, newshounds, boehlert, kos