Forgive me for using a script from tonight's show as a base from which to expand my point. But over the last few days I have watched as a pretty shoddily researched "purpose pitch" of a web piece on my show's ratings has been converted by the rampant right wing bias of the media into actual published reports that the program is facing imminent cancellation.

Let me cut to the chase (since this is besides the point, except insomuch as it contradicts the meme): the show isn't about to be cancelled. It isn't slumping. MSNBC isn't worried about it. NBC isn't worried about it. It is making them a ---damned fortune, in fact (and they'd owe me a ---damned fortune if they did cancel it, which they aren't going to).

It's the route by which the thing got seized by the sleaze blogs like Breitbart and NewsCorp and the like that so beautifully, almost diagrammatically, illustrates how Conservatives come to believe the crazy, nonsensical, totally fact-free things they believe, how they transform discernible, provable lies, into their wishful-thinking version of the truth.

Rupert Murdoch's vanity newspaper, the New York Post, put out one of its typical pieces of crap in its gossip section. I always thought there was a Freudian clue in the fact that "Page Six" is almost never actually printed on the literal page six. But I digress: "Has the countdown begun for the end of 'Countdown'?" Murdoch's minion continued: "even Olbermann's former supporters on the left are tuning out." The Post got this, it writes, from blogs at National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Times, and, quite knee-jerkily, it assumes the reader will be convinced that 100 percent of the content therein is southpaw stuff straight from The Kremlin. It is thus using those organizations as if they are evidence of the supposed 'tune out on the left.'

The NPR blog, it turns out, cites as a source the L.A. Times blog, which it authenticates with the seemingly decisive description "hardly a partisan forum." Except the L.A. Times blog post was written by Andrew Malcolm, a former Press Secretary to Laura Bush, a washed-up political operative, and absolutely the last person on the continent to earn the praise "hardly a partisan." I once had the audacity to call out Mr. Malcolm on one of his most egregious lies, and he has since missed no opportunity to report the slightest glimmer of information that might both cast me in a poor light and not get him or the paper sued. The Times, even in its flush days before the Tribune and the implosion of newspapers set in, was edited with remarkable casualness, and as it manages to snooze away a monopoly in the second largest market in the country, it still is.

Anyway, Mr. Malcolm managed to write a column titled "Countdown begins for the end of Keith Olbermann's Countdown?" which he predicated on the relative ratings last month of my program to CNN, as had been reported in yet another blog from a site called Daily Finance. Daily Finance's extremely thin-skinned media writer, always hostile, and snickered at behind his back by his rivals, had himself cherry-picked the January ratings to report that "the 8 p.m. shows on CNN and HLN have narrowed the gap."

So the New York Post lifted from an NPR blog which lifted from Laura Bush's Ex-Press Secretary's Blog which lifted from Daily-Finance's Blog which left out details that makes the whole meme nonsensical.

Namely: my show's ratings actually grew from December to last month, by five percent at 8 O'Clock and six percent at 10. Grew in a month in which CNN did exceptional, almost continuous coverage from Haiti. Grew to 27 percent ahead of CNN and 24 percent ahead of Headline News. Grew from the end of a year in which MSNBC replaced CNN as the number two rated news network among younger viewers in prime-time. Grew in the past week, too, even as the blog TV Newser reported CNN had dropped in that same demographic to fifth place behind Fox, us, Headline News, and CNBC. One night they were behind The Weather Channel.

And yet the right wing believes that Countdown is about to be cancelled, because it so desperately wants it to be cancelled, that the facts, and the ratings, and the profits, become irrelevant. And it is better for them to pretend they are getting their way, than to acknowledge that they are not.