When the Audit Bureau of Circulations released the latest circulation figures for U.S. daily newspapers yesterday, a surprising statistic emerged: Rupert Murdoch's New York Post has catapulted in front of the (New York) Daily News in daily circulation while also displacing the Washington Post and jumping to fifth in the rankings of U.S. daily papers.

In light of the news, the Post offers this self-adulation on Page Six: "The New York Post made newspaper history yesterday, leapfrogging the Daily News and The Washington Post to become the fifth-largest paper in the country -- and it's all thanks to you...The new circulation figures...prove what savvy New Yorkers have known for years -- the Daily News is yesterday's news."

"We have created a newspaper with a unique voice that reflects the heart and soul of New York, and today's publisher's statement, which for the first time places us ahead of the Daily News and in the top five newspapers in the country, is a testament to the vitality of the paper and the cherished role it plays in the life of this city," Rupert Murdoch added.

Bloggers' reactions to the Post's victory were mixed.

"When it was announced yesterday that the Post had finally overtaken the News in circulation, we expressed our fervent hopes that the [Post] would celebrate its victory in a gracious, restrained manner; those hopes were quickly dashed," writes Gawker. "Comes today's Post, which, in addition to a two-page opening spread full of charts and graphs and gleeful cackling from Ed Koch, includes a four-page 'souvenir pullout,' featuring some of the paper's finest wood and an embarrassing encomium by Steve Cuozzo which actually compares the Post to the United States during the Cold War and ends with the line, 'The good guys won again.'"

Some were skeptical of circulation fraud.

"The only paper to buck the wave in a remarkable way was the, yes, New York Post," writes Will Divide at Huck and Jim. "So remarkable that I am sure this morning there is at least one fraud prosecutor, maybe a whole office full, interested in looking into practices of a circulation department that has long been suspected of ties to, ahem, certain people. The first thing you need to do when cheating on a test is to make sure you don't do too well. Maybe the loss of revenue after the breakup of the Page Six extortion racket sent Rupe's kids in pursuit of less-than-modest gains elsewhere." Continuing in this vein, Jossip wags a finger at the Daily News' editorial retort: "Why should the Daily News feel like the bastard child of New York when it, too, can spin the numbers in its favor? Mort Zuckerman's daily is playing defense this morning, reminding readers it's still the No. 1 paper in the metro area."

Other bloggers, though, attributed the Post's triumph to its conservative editorial leanings. "I did the research after noticing an anomaly in the data: the conservative New York Post was the only major paper to record any significant rise in circulation this year, and it was quite large," writes Baruk at Iris blog. "I then looked at the trend over a number of years and detected an extraordinary trend: every newspaper consistently lost subscribers, except for four which experienced solid growth. Three of those four are the nation's only conservative dailies, while the fourth is arguably the least partisan paper, USA Today."

Perhaps, according to one blogger, we can extract from all of this a forecast for next week's midterm elections. "The rise in popularity of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post would come as no surprise if the Post were competing somewhere besides the most liberal-oriented news market on the planet," writes Tom Bowler at Libertarian Leanings. "But like Fox News, another Murdoch venture, its conservative stance hasn't hurt the Post at all. In fact it may be the thing that drives those numbers. While pundits and pollsters predict a Democratic takeover in the November, Post circulation numbers suggest something else may be going on. If Republicans hold on in both Houses of Congress or if they make gains, Post circulation will have been the more accurate weather vane."