People who moan about ratings been killed/boosted by one person, consider this:
Imagine over the course of a year, you saw smoke coming out the windows of 5 houses. On each occasion, a fire truck arrived a few minutes later, at which point, 4 out of 5 times, fire was engulfing the house. No-one in their right mind seeing this correlation would think that firemen caused smoking houses to set alight.
Correlation ≠ causation
