"The next day, the Chicago Tribune's political blog, The Swamp, parroted the same stat: "FOX viewership is up 9 percent and 14 percent among adults since the feud with the White House started." Done deal, right? Wrong, because those numbers didn't add up. Or more specifically, those numbers did not reflect Fox News' ratings two weeks prior to the controversy and two weeks after. Instead, the numbers represented a cherry-picked attempt to create the illusion of a ratings spike for Fox News. And here's how. As I mentioned, the two weeks prior to the White House dispute cover the dates from September 28-October 11. The two weeks after that cover the dates from October 12-October 25. But the tabulation used to come up with the 9 percent ratings gain (i.e. 1.2 million vs. 1.3 million) only measured Fox News' post-controversy ratings from October 12-October 23, which meant it was a 14-day comparison vs. a 12-day comparison. And which two days were left off the tabulation? Saturday, October 24 and Sunday, October 25. Traditionally, Saturday and Sunday, of course, are the two lowest-rated days of the cable news week. What happened when you included October 24 and October 25 in the tabulation to make a true two-week-vs.-two-week comparison? Suddenly, that 9 percent gain in overall viewers evaporated into a barely-there 2 percent blip, while that 14 percent increase among viewers 25-54 shrunk to a much more modest 7 percent bump. Behold the massive Fox News ratings "spike":" - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

This has been a recurring pattern for wingnuts and their talking points: throw out some half-assed idea, say it enough times til it becomes a meme, then constantly repeat in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When the meme does fall down, it doesn't matter, because they now have four other memes to prop up. - Steven Perez