Did Nexstar’s News Nation offer up a bribe to The Daily Beast for this story?

The Daily Beast writes, "NewsNation was up triple digits in both total primetime viewership and in the key advertising demographic of viewers aged 25-54—with 102-percent year-over-year growth in the former and 100-percent growth in the latter.”

In the story, notice how the Daily Beast uses percentages while talking about News Nation’s “impressive” growth.

This is a trick that struggling TV stations often use when touting their ratings. A station could have gotten a .5 rating in the May book last year and a .9 rating in the May book this year. The promo comes out that ratings are up nearly 100%.

It’s true, but the ratings still suck.

So, let’s look at this blow job piece that the Daily Beast did for News Nation.

Yes, the percentages show an increase, but what about the real numbers?

I think that we can all agree that CNN’s ratings have sucked for some time. In May primetime, CNN averaged an awful 494,000 total viewers. To put that into perspective, MSNBC was over a million viewers and Fox News was nearly a million and a half. NewsMax was a dismal 298,000 viewer average.

So, what did News Nation pull in May?

It was a million, in fact, it wasn’t even a half million.

Ouch, it wasn’t even 100,000.

News Nation averaged 94,000 viewers in primetime.

The network ranked 66th in the primetime ratings, putting it behind Nick Jr, The Great American Family Channel, and Pop (I never heard of those two).

So, why is the Daily Beast spouting just straight-up bullshit in a puff piece like this?

As I said, I’m guessing some money changed hands.

I could be wrong, but I can’t explain it any other way.

Let’s see if News Nation ads don’t suddenly pop up on the Daily Beast website.