You remember newshound Priscilla, don’t you? Besides being an inveterate liar she is also the epitome of sloppy incoherence. Just recently she went into great detail about an interview she said aired on Huckabee’s Saturday night program--a program that was pre-empted for breaking news coverage. Oops. Well today she’s whining about a segment on Spring Break in Mexico:

On Friday's "Factor," Bill reported that Obama will be meeting with Mexican president Felipe Calderon, the president of a country that's "in terrible shape" because of drug violence.

Now it might (or might not) surprise you to learn that there was no such segment on Friday’s Factor. Or Thursday’s. But there was on Wednesday’s...Wednesday, March 2nd--more than three weeks ago! Obviously Prissy doesn’t watch The Factor and has no idea what airs or when. After all you can’t expect the ‘we watch Fox’ crowd to actually watch Fox!

Where did Prissy get the idea that all this happened on ‘Friday’s Factor’? Because the video clip she found was uploaded on Friday! Yep, that was the extent of it. But wait...let’s look at Priscilla’s opening sentence again:

On Friday's "Factor," Bill reported that Obama will be meeting with Mexican president Felipe Calderon, the president of a country that's "in terrible shape" because of drug violence.

Obama and Calderon met weeks ago. Yet Prissy thinks it hasn’t happened yet? Even if she can’t be bothered to watch the programs she ‘critiques’, Prissy might pay some attention to current events, at least enough to recognize a meeting that happened nearly a month ago. It was in all the papers.

Priscilla is a clueless embarrassment, but the ‘guest-blogger’ who goes by ‘Brian’ has problems with something most people master in grade school: arithmetic. Here he is accusing Chris Wallace of not telling the truth when he said Fox News Sunday routinely has more viewers than two of the other Sunday morning shows:

We thought you’d like to know that on 3/20/11, 3/13/11, 3/7/11, and 2/20/11 (I couldn’t find ratings for 2/28/11) Fox News Sunday had far fewer viewers than any of the other Sunday shows.

The four links he cites are posts at TV Newser; let’s look at the first one:

• NBC “Meet the Press”: 3.52M
• CBS “Face the Nation”: 2.69M
• ABC “This Week”: 2.66M
• FOX “Fox News Sunday”: 1.41M

Ah, but there’s a catch. ‘Brian’ leaves out what appears directly above this table in TV Newser’s post:

On cable replays “Fox News Sunday” added 3.13M total viewers and 579k demo viewers.

Say what? That means Fox News Sunday didn’t have ‘far fewer viewers’ than the other Sunday shows, as ‘Brian’ claims. Its audience of 4.5 million made it the most-watched Sunday show on March 20.

Every one of the TV Newser posts cited by ‘Brian’ includes a count of the viewers added to FNS (and Meet the Press) from their cable replays. The results utterly contradict the claim that FNS has ‘far fewer viewers than any of the other Sunday shows’:

• March 20 Fox News Sunday: #1
• March 13 Fox News Sunday: #1
• March 7 Meet the Press: #1, Fox News Sunday: #2
• February 20: Meet the Press: #1, Fox News Sunday: #2

On each date above This Week (ABC) and Face the Nation (CBS) were far behind in third/fourth place.

How is it that ‘Brian’ cites four ratings reports, each of which notes the ‘added viewers’ from cable replays, but still claims FNS had ‘far fewer viewers’? Maybe he is simply incompetent, a moronic bumbler incapable of reading the posts he himself cites--four times in a row. Or, given his track record, perhaps Brian deliberately played a numbers game, hiding data from his credulous readers in another attempt to smear Fox News. We report, you decide.

Tags: newshounds