LOS ANGELES – Last week, MSNBC President Phil Griffin questioned the ratings jump that Megyn Kelly’s new prime-time Fox News show, “The Kelly File,” experienced between its premiere Monday and its second show on Tuesday, calling the increase “impossible” and demanding someone investigate the figures.
“Tuesday–you guys should be doing some investigations,” Griffin told media news site MediaBistro.com. “I have never seen it in all my years of cable, same overnight, same everything, and they doubled their ratings in a day? It is impossible.”
Apparently not. The Daily News looked into Griffin’s allegation and reported that a Nielsen investigation confirmed the numbers were indeed accurate.
"The Kelly File" jumped 116 percent in the key 25-54 demographic to 623K viewers, beating MSNBC’s "The Rachel Maddow Show." Kelly's show also grew 34 percent in total viewers, rising to almost 2.8 million.
“The notion that [the increase] merited an ‘investigation’ is frankly comical and an indication of the rampant Fox paranoia which has overtaken their competitors,” media critic John Ziegler told FOX411. “Only an MSNBC executive could possibly look at Megyn Kelly and Rachel Maddow and say, ‘There is no way that Americans possibly strongly prefer the former to the latter!’”
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