Fox Lied About Their “Ratings Soar”

During the entire White House/Fox News feud FOX decided to bolster about their “soaring ratings”. This meme was then picked up by a lot of talking heads in the mainstream media. Media Matters decided to go to the data and see exactly what “soar” meant to FOX:

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.

And since a picture is worth a thousand words (and something that most FOX viewers are only able to comprehend), here’s a nice graph:

Soar or spiked seems like a very big over-exaggeration. I doubt you can even call that a bump. Instead FOX really gained nothing from the war.