Malala Yousafzai’s (co-)winning of the Nobel Peace Prize dominated cable news Twitter on Friday, with her co-winner Satyarthu Kailash coming in second place (on Twitter). Ebola ended up way down the list, and even ISIS couldn’t make it onto the leaderboard, being blocked by the ALMA awards:
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I had expected the ALMA awards, which were broadcast on MSNBC last night, to win best hour and best day, so I was surprised this morning to see that Hannity won best hour and CNNi won best day. It’s not that the ALMA awards didn’t generate some traffic, but they were in fifth place for best hour, after Hannity, Ed Show, Kelly File, and Hayes. They were in third place for best day, after CNNi and Hannity (and ahead of The Five and Susteren).
Here’s the rankings of the shows based upon their broadcast hour:
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You can see the raw data here: 2014-10-10-ShowStats.csv
Ebola continued to be the top topic in Cable News Twitter on Thursday. Also percolating were ISIS, police actions in St. Louis, autism, and education secretary Arne Duncan:
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Top 100 words and tags for the day: 2014-10-09-WordStats.csv 2014-10-09-TagStats.csv
CNN’s picking up … internationally. Thursday saw The Kelly File win best hour, and CNN International win best day. It’s probably safe to say that a lot of CNNi’s traffic was not domestic, but it’s hard to say (less than 2% of all tweets have any geographical information with them, which should make you always suspect any conclusions people draw about geography).
Following CNNi for best day was The Five, Hannity, Kelly, and Colbert. Following Kelly for best hour was Hayes, Morning Joe, Ed Show, and Hannity. A quiet day for Sean, who is normally #1 for the day and #2 for the hour!
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Raw data for the day: 2014-10-09-ShowStats.csv
This caught my eye in the wonderful Dylan Byers’ blog:
“For the two-and-a-half years that AC 360 served as the lead in to Piers Morgan’s program on CNN, it always delivered a higher rating than Piers’ program,” Rivers wrote. “And for the 7 months that Piers Morgan’s program led into AC 360, 360 always delivered a higher rating than Piers’ program. It is sad that Piers is trying to find a new job by misrepresenting how he performed in his old one.”
That’s pretty strong wording. Always is absolute. So is it true? I took a trip through the past to look at a few random days’ 25-43 (“in the demo”) ratings to see if Piers always lost to Anderson. Links are provided:
AC 360 @ 8pm: 214
Piers @ 9pm: 130
AC 360 @ 10pm: 115
AC 360 @ 8pm: 132
Piers @ 9pm: 108
AC 360 @ 10pm: 103
AC 360 @ 8pm: 119
Piers @ 9pm: 137
AC 360 @ 10pm: 155
Look, you can say that Piers, on general, got worse ratings than Anderson Cooper. Or you can say that I just happen to pick a few days where Piers did better than AC360. But you cannot say that Anderson Cooper always beat Piers. Because it’s factually wrong.
Piers offered a qualitative judgement, which is arguable, but CNN offered a quantitative riposte which failed to check out.