A split decision on Sunday — The Melissa Harris-Perry Show, with guest host Dorian Warren, won the best hour of the day, while Up with Steve Kornacki had the best day overall.
Note: Starting this week, I’ve eliminated E! News from the ratings. It’s not so much that they didn’t deserve to “win” when they did as they often obscured the news topics that were getting attention. There’s no way the “Hottie of the week” was ever a real news topic; but it often ended up being the most talked about.
Saturday was Armed Forces Day, and talk about the event was the dominant trending topic in Cable News Twitter.
The Melissa Harris-Perry Show took Best Hour on Saturday during the 11am hour, as frequently happens. No other show broke through the 1000 mentions mark. Since the show has a substitute host scheduled for Sunday, it will be a more open race for the top spot on the back half of the weekend.
Sean Hannity had the best day, which is not surprising either. In the case of Hannity, he has one of the top 10 conservative hashtags, and so his hashtag gets wide and constant usage.
Everyone who uses Twitter is familiar with and uses hashtags. But the usage of hashtags is not uniform; some people use them to identify specific topics while others use them as a sort of group identity. For those who use them as group identity, their hashtags tend to stand out in the crowd because of the consistent and widespread usage of them. Topics come and go from day to day, but groups persist. And that gives group hashtags unique staying power.
In the realm of US politics, conservative Twitter users tend to focus on a small set of group hashtags that get high usage as a result. Here are the top conservative hashtags, as a percentage of overall english language tweets:
A pretty darn interesting collection of words in the word cloud on Friday, but I sure can’t make much sense of them in a holistic fashion.