The Myth of Fox News' Ratings Spike

Fact: The breathless claim that Fox News' ratings recently spiked thanks to the White House's public critique is bogus hype -- hype that Fox News and the Beltway press have relentlessly pushed.

It's just not true.

No matter how many times reporters and pundits made the claim, a detailed analysis of Nielsen ratings numbers clearly indicates that in the two weeks after the White House in mid-October sparked a media controversy by claiming Rupert Murdoch's channel was not a legitimate news organization, Fox News' ratings did not soar or go "through the roof." In fact, not only did Fox News' overall ratings not soar, they experienced no significant increase at all. Instead, in the two weeks following the initial verbal jousts with the White House, Fox News' total day ratings virtually flatlined.

Another example of the Beltway press not letting the facts get in the way of a good story? It sure looks that way. In this case, we saw nearly universal agreement among media elites that the White House decision to publicly call out Fox News was monumentally dumb, thin-skinned, short-sighted, and uncivil. (Paging the etiquette police!)

Everyone said so. Therefore pundits were certain that Fox News' ratings were way up and that Obama and his aides had made a huge tactical blunder. The ratings angle simply provided statistical ammunition for what the Beltway press corps already knew to be the truth: Fact-checking Fox News, in the immortal words of The Washington Post's CW-loving Sally Quinn, was "absolutely crazy."

Except it turns out none of that was true. There was no viewer stampede toward Fox News.

Read the full Media Matters column here.

 

Follow Eric Boehlert on Twitter: www.twitter.com/EricBoehlert

Comments

[CompliantMedia]

What does "CW-loving" mean?

I am usually pretty savvy about these obscure references, but this one has me baffled.

[Suntio]

Ah, there you go again with those pesky facts.

[jsgaetano]

I noticed a secret way to know when someone on Fox News is lying- their lips start to move!

[Rmath]

Another day, another Fox lie.

[Indon]

Sir,
Yet again I implore you to cross-link your posts in full on Huffington Post. This is a good exposure site for many conservatives who have the intellectual capability to note when a citation is made, but are too intellectually lazy to go to another site to finish reading an article (or really do more than skim through the article obliviously).

Posting the full article would help to increase visibility of the Fox phenomenon among those most likely to be Fox's prey - intellectually lazy people who don't ever bother to fact check. You would be striking a blow for Truth and The American Way (not so much 'justice', which has nothing to do with it).

Also, doing so might minimize editing errors. You accidentally posted a paragraph twice in this article.

[blizb]

You make it sound like you are his boss or the editor. I didn't notice any duplicated paragraph in this article or in the link but maybe it has been fixed. Truth is subjective to Fox.

Fox made a statement to CNN in an article in response to critics and said they "were comparable to the editorial page of a newspaper".

Editorials aren't news.

Fox admits they editorialize "news".

Fox presents to the viewing public editorialized news, commentary and opinion. They focus on personality for the sake of presentation, ratings, and to make money.

They are doing the viewing public a huge disservice by not providing them with a disclaimer about their shows.

In order to be "fair and balanced" wouldn't they need an alternate view to be presented?

Alan Colmes left Fox, name any other Fox Democrat or liberal host.

They just fired without reason a liberal contributor and didn't have the decency to do so in person.

What are their hiring practices? Fair?? How do they get that many people to all present the same political view? Wouldn't they have to either ask them their party or political views in order to get hired??

[Indon]

You misunderstand the intent of my post. Did you read it?

I'm not actually disagreeing with _anything_ the guy is saying. At all. I'm saying I think he should post the entire thing on this site so that the conservatives who read HuffPost don't just skim through obliviously and then make inane comments about how the article lacked citations.

And yes, the paragraph was fixed relatively quickly.

[gabberwok]

Fox thrive on controversy. I'm not sure if the recent "war" with the White House has had anything to do with their ratings, but they definitely do better with a Democrat in the White House. I wonder if that has anything to do with their attempts to sabotage Republican moderates?

Either way, it's definitely in the best interests of both the President and Fox News to keep elevating the network as the main voice of the Republican party.

[PerryWhite]

This blog might make sense if the author had cited actual statementss that FNC's ratings were soaring or spiking. As is, it's merely a straw man argument.

[Indon]

Had, you read, you might have noticed that the article on this site is only a part of the full article, and that the full article does precisely what you think it should do.

As an aside, the editing on the article is kinda meh. It repeats a paragraph.

[PerryWhite]

If it wasn't worth posting here, I'm not interested in chasing over to Medium Matters to bump up their page views.

[NICELYDONE]

TVBYTHE NUMBERS came out and basically said FOX has kept their 2008 numbers or increased somewhat , but MSNBC and CNN have dropped dramatically, thus the tired MSNBC excuse of not being available cannot be used,,,, also , the tired excuse of dividing the viewership into the population is flawed as there were also 290 million Americans who did NOT vote for Pres O..Would Media Matters also point out the interesting relationship between the HP/MSNBC personnel ?

[Indon]

There's really not much of note to that trend.

Computer savvy people are watching less television, or not watching television at all, in increasing numbers.

People who watch Fox tend to be less computer savvy.

So Fox's ratings drop slower than that of other shows.

[seawolf77]

All the bigots have already been counted.

[Dosadi]

Thankfully republicans can't count, conservatives won't count and bigots don't count.

[kladinvt]

So if on average CNN has 1.1 million viewers and Fox 2.3 million viewers and the population of the U.S. is 300 million, why does anyone really pay attention to what Fox says, since the vast majority of Americans are NOT watching either network. And perhaps, the majority of Americans are NOT even watching TV period!

Could this be the definition of the term "self-aggr­andizement­"???

[josephXY]

Thanks for making this clear. What also matters quite a lot is the lefts obsession with
Fox, it is a really weird, strange or maybe even pervert obsession to create and demand for
Fox. It is not the people from Fox who demand attention like this, it is this strange kind of
critics. Day in, day out, listen to what ... O'Reilly etc. said.
What is also coming along is the further fact that those left wing critics insist for instance
on a corporate success (financial success) that does not exist anymore since quite some time.
News Corps financial fortunes are declining, they will Q- report soon again, likely reporting
some more decling revenue, etc. again.
Suggested search words, using Google and the clicking on NEWS (Google will select the
appropriate news to that):
"newspaper revenue"
"media revenue"
"ad revenue"
and all the relevant news come up to that on an ongoing basis

It is the left-wing nuts who should be taken to task, held responsible for spreading
BS, factual lies, on behalf of what they criticize, wail, complain, whine, are outraged about
24/7. It is not Murdoch or the other media who could spread such corporate / company
nonsense, they just could not do it.

[thebirdstheword]

how was that 1+ million plus tea-bagger march?

[Indon]

Those viewers aren't the same every day. Those are only the people watching at any given time.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons not to take Nielsen ratings as legitimate, but this isn't one of them.

[Fenarkleman]

John Boehner is orange.

[Dosadi]

Thank you.

[doza78]

Nice story, but I think we'd all like to see some hard numbers to back it up. You can't just write things like this without any cold hard facts(i.e. numbers) to help. Only reliable proven facts can help any opinion. Not one single example was given throughout. I think if the Obama Admin. would concentrate on real issues and real problems, instead of some "media war" between the White House and Fox News, we might get some things accomplished.

[tedmore123]

If you click on the 'here' at the bottom of the article just after 'Except it turns out none of that was true. There was no viewer stampede toward Fox News. the full Media Matters column here' Media Matters goes into the statistics of Fox's bogus claim.

[doza78]

Not sure I trust an article written by Media Matters for a fair and balanced report. Anyway I still can't believe how many people waist their time with suff like this! I mean come on, who cares what one news orginization says over another. Fox News leans right, MSNBC & CNN leans left. Everyone knows it. Watch whatever one you want or don't watch any at all. The article is pointless in itself. Of course Fox News is gonna say their ratings are up. So does every other network! It's really sad when people validate their own ideology based on cable news ratings. As if saying more people watching a certain network proves there are more people with like minded thinking. Gimme a brake.

[ninthraphael]

were a country of several hundred million..if some 3 million is watching fox, that proves the statsitics...

[TryToBeFlexible]

They already own the dumb-viewer market.

[philistine]

The voice of reason speaks. I couldn't reconcile any Fox uptick with observed events. I assumed that I was missing something, but instead I was being misled by our mainstream press once again. Thanks to mediamatters for riding herd on the Villagers. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.