First, a word of caution: because of the breaking news in Ferguson, Mo., schedules were thrown out the window as events unfolded.  MSNBC’s coverage included on-the-ground reports by Chris Hayes, while CNN’s CNN International team anchored their coverage.  Al Jazeera seemed to pop ion and out, and Fox News ignored it more or less.  I tried to capture CNN and MSNBC’s impromptu broadcasts as much as possible, but I have undoubtedly missed a large swath of Twitter activity.  So take this for what it is.

What I see is roughly the following:

1. MSNBC just dominated the coverage in Ferguson.  Chris Hayes had, in one hour, more mentions than almost anyone ever gets in an entire day on any network.  I appreciate that there were more people on MSNBC’s broadcast, but Chris was the main attraction (e.g. Goldie Taylor got about 1000 mentions in the 11pm hour, although her big surge in mentions came right after midnight and so missed Sunday’s cutoff).  Chris’ daily mentions are essentially as many as MSNBC’s (@MSNBC).
2. The Melissa Harris-Perry show, which was in the morning, would have easily won best hour and best day if I had not included Chris in the rankings.  But her mentions during the broadcast were among the strongest she’s seen.
3. Events in Ferguson continued past the midnight ET hour, which is where I end my day.  The ratings for Monday will be similarly affected, as we’ll see when I run the stats tomorrow.

Again, with schedules topsy-turvy because of events, I did not capture everything going on, but you can see from what I did capture that Sunday was huge.

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Clearly, “Blackfish” is CNN’s “Who wants to be a millionaire”.  No matter that it’s a year old, every showing generates a huge reaction on Twitter.  And so, on Saturday, it swept both the best hour and best day.  If you remove Blackfish from the tank, Cashin In would have won best hour and The Five (when you take into consideration all the individual host accounts) would have won best day.

The Melissa Harris-Perry Show also had a strong showing on Saturday, fueled by conversation about events in Ferguson, Mo.

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