Mitt Romney’s decision to skip the 2016 Presidential election put him at the top of the trending topics in Cable News Twitter.
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Raw data for the day: 2015-01-30-TagStats.csv and 2015-01-30-WordStats.csv
Friday was an interesting day in Cable News (and Cable News Twitter). Superficially, it looked like a fairly typical day: the Kelly File won best hour and Hannity best day. But there were some permutations to MSNBC’s schedule that affected the runners-up.
After Kelly for best hour came each of the two hours of Morning Joe at Night, a superbowl special shot in Phoenix. There was a lot of grumbling on Twitter about its replacing Hayes and Maddow. In fact, Maddow got more mentions during her normal 9pm slot (1465) than Morning Joe did (1427). Chris Hayes got almost as many mentions (1651) in his 8pm slot as Morning Joe did (1705). It will be interesting to see how the ratings shake out when they surface; I suspect that the deployment to Phoenix did not boost MSNBC’s viewership. Honestly, it seemed more like an excuse for some MSNBC personalities to take a road trip…
Here’s the top 30 shows on Cable News Twitter, as measured by best hour:
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Raw data for day: 2015-01-30-ShowStats.csv
Once again Obama and Iran ended up at the top of the trending topics. I wanted to know why Iran is showing up, given that there’s very little actual news these days about the country or the talks. It turns out that it’s pretty much what happens when no topics really dominate the news — a few tweets that target the media as a whole get heavily retweeted. In this case, we have tweets like these:
#Iran, Tehran: Youth and Basij militant clash in Fatemi Blvd #IranTalks @AP @AFP @Reuters @UPI @FoxNews @CNN @CBC pic.twitter.com/sVUxmBd3NW
— Tina shokohi (@Setarehgan) January 29, 2015
#Iran, Tehran Protest Rally In Front Of Parliament #IranTalks @AP @AFP @Reuters @UPI @FoxNews @CNN #Iranian #News pic.twitter.com/IBMEiLZUYm
— Tina shokohi (@Setarehgan) January 29, 2015
The original sender is in Iran and is unlikely to be responding to CNN or Fox News; rather, they are carpet bombing Twitter. If it were a heavy news day, these would be lost, but on a quiet day they rise to the top. When you combine that with some more organic content, like this tweet…
We sit and we’re amused by the spat between @BarackObama & @netanyahu — BUT the reality is, #Iran poses a NUCLEAR THREAT @FoxNews
— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) January 30, 2015
… you end up topping the topics for the day.
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The Five (when you count mentions of its hosts’ accounts) had the best day overall on Cable News Twitter, and The Kelly File had the best hour. Following Kelly were Hayes, Hannity, Schultz, and Maddow. This represents a resurgent MSNBC which has been rather weak on Twitter recently. The full top 30:
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Raw data: 2015-01-29-ShowStats.csv
Strange that the Grand Prix de Monaco seems to be bubbling to the top of topics; if this keeps up I will investigate why. Also at the top of topics is NATO:
Raw data: 2015-01-28-TagStats.csv and 2015-01-28-WordStats.csv