Ian Schwartz notes that the New York Times, in a puff piece on Keith Olbermann, prints just about every statistic it can come up with to portray Olbermann as a burgeoning cable news phenomenon. Of course, that means excluding the actual ratings:

Throughout the article, columnist Bill Carter writes about Countdown’s ratings only by it’s growth and not by actual numbers. An ignorant reader would come away thinking Olbermann is some television star who is a real competitor in the cable news race.

The NYT is going out of its way to pump up MSNBC now that the network has decided to rebrand itself as a liberal alternative to Fox News. Kind of reminds you of the days when they were relentlessly hyping Air America.

UPDATE: Gabriel at The Great Satan put together a graph that illustrates what the NYT left out.