Cable News Twitter slowed down on Friday, with events in Ferguson becoming a lot less 24/7-ish. Fox News’ On The Record had the best hour, while CNN’s continuing live coverage managed to win the day for Don Lemon and the CNN Tonight crew.
Ferguson Continues As Top Topic in Cable News Twitter for Thursday, August 21, 2014
Cable News Trending Topics for 2014-08-21
Ferguson is hanging in there at the top trending topic in Cable News. I suspect the media will pull back its on-site presence this weekend, which may well de-escalate Twitter as well. We’ll see.
Lawrence O’Donnell’s Well Timed Tweet Wins Him Cable News Twitter on Thursday, August 21, 2014
Lawrence O’Donnell won the best hour on Cable News Twitter, something I don’t know that I’ve seen before! It was all because of retweets of this post:
Breaking: Officer who shot Michael Brown did not file an incident report. Details @TheLastWord at 10pm
Lawrence O’DonnellThe post came out 10 minutes before the show, and received a very heavy volume of retweets, mentions, and replies, a large percentage of which fell during his broadcast. Clearly, there’s a lesson there — release your bombshell news right before your broadcast!
Don Lemon managed to bring in the best day, overall, with CNN Tonight. He’s still in Ferguson, getting lots of airtime, which generates engagement. I have to say I like in the field Don Lemon a lot better than at the anchor desk Don Lemon. It’s not quite Cronkite-goes-to-Vietnam, but whenever the anchors hit the road it adds a certain importance to the news.
Ferguson still dominates Cable News Twitter — but for how long?
Cable News Trending Topics for 2014-08-20
Ferguson continues to dominate Cable News Twitter, which surprised me a bit, as I expected news of ISIS to at least get close to the top. Still, interest in Ferguson has started to wane in the past few days, as this chart shows:
Click to enlarge
This is total mentions on Twitter, not just cable news related mentions, but it shows how the de-escalation on the streets diminishes the conversation on Twitter as well. The last time Ferguson was not the dominate topic was on the 16th. We can see that, without any new flare-ups, we should soon drop back to a similar level of Ferguson mentions; that will provide a low enough hurdle that other topics may move to the forefront.
Hayes and Hannity win Cable News Twitter on Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Chris Hayes came out on top Wednesday with the most mentions throughout the day, while Sean Hannity had the best hour. The best reach was had by Anderson Cooper, which indicates that even though he had about 60% of the daily mentions of Chris Hayes, his mentions were likely seen by more people.
Regardless, a good day (mention-wise) by all…