Friday’s Countdown gave the “Worst Person in the World” award to Ruper Murdoch for allegedly saying on an earnings call “we have never been a company that tolerates facts.”

But our winner, in a fixed news trifecta, Rupert. His company, Newscorp, lost six billion 400 million dollars in the final quarter of 2008. It has now forecast a 30 percent drop in profits for the first half of 2009. Wall street thought the drop would only be at worse half that. If I were O‘Reilly, I‘d tell you that Newscorp hemorrhaged cash because of Fox and O‘Reilly‘s fascism and stuff like that. But I live in the real world. All media is being crushed, especially TV, although apparently only two newscasts in America exceeded financial projections in 2008. Golly, happened to be mine and Rachel‘s.
Nevertheless, Rupert is hemorrhaging money and his response to this was bizarre even for him. He may have coined a new slogan for Fox Noise. In fact, he may have coined the most honest new slogan for Fox Noise ever. “While it‘s impossible to be completely prepared for a downturn of this magnitude, we began priming ourselves for a weakening economy last year.” Shiver me timbers. “We implemented strict cost cutting measures across all our operations. We reduced head count in individual businesses where appropriate.” You will be keeping a civil tongue in your head when you talking to the good captain. “And we scaled back on capital expenditures. Even on finance terms, we have never been a company that tolerates facts.”
Oh, my god. The new slogan. Fox News, we have never been a company that tolerates facts! Rupert, beware Tim Hawkins, Sean Hannity be below decks, Murdock, today‘s worst person in the world!

What Murdoch actually said was “. . .we have never been a company that tolerates fat.”

Olbermann apologized last night:

Incidentally, a correction on Murdoch. We have quoted several times the transcript of a News Corp conference call provided by the usually reliable financial website called SeakingAlpha.com, in which the News Corp boss was quoted as saying, “we have never been a company that tolerates facts.” It turns out SeekingAlpha.com got it wrong. Murdoch, in fact, said “we have never been a company that tolerates fat.” SeekingAlpha.com has yet to correct or apologize for its mistake, so we will. Henceforth, we will stick exclusively to the transcripts from ShiverMeTimbers.com.

Here’s the actual transcript, since corrected. What’s more interesting is what was said on the call prior to the fact/fat issue:

And finally from the FOX News Channel and this is the result of higher affiliate rates and increased subscribers and ad revenues, which raises our operating profit and margins to record levels. New affiliate deals for the FOX News are now in effect with all major cable and satellite operators, including our most recent deals with Comcast and Equistar. And just as a reminder, comparative results at this segment are impacted by the sales of the three-RSNs last year, which contributed $51 million revenues and $23 million in operating profit in the year ago results.

So much for O’Reilly’s “fascism” turning off viewers.

Oh, and TV Newser has Tuesday’s rating up. O’Reilly and Hannity in the lead at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., Nancy Grace nearly equal to Olbermann for second, and Rachel Maddow behind Larry King.