The death of ESPN sportscaster Scott Stuart dominated Cable News Twitter conversations on Sunday, followed by Iran and the Roger Ebert documentary “Life Itself”:
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As a side note, as CNN is not showing the Blackfish documentary (and has not shown it for a while), I am not tracking its mentions anymore — at least until CNN decides to show it again.
Raw data for the day: 2015-01-04-TagStats.csv and 2015-01-04-WordStats.csv
CNN’s airing of the Roger Ebert documentary “Life Itself” won the most mentions during an hour and throughout the day on Sunday. In fact, all three hours of the showing (at 9, 10, and 11pm EST) were the most mentioned during the day:
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Following closely was MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, and, not quite as closely, Steve Kornacki.
That Kornacki does so well in the 8am and 9am slots is amazing and impressive (especially since it’s 5am on the west coast). That strength raises the question: Why not put him on at noon or shift the schedule back two hours to start him at 10am? Surely that would garner more viewers for the weekend overall.
It’s a shame CNN doesn’t do a sequel to Blackfish, because people sure keep talking about it:
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Raw Data: 2015-01-03-TagStats.csv and 2015-01-03-WordStats.csv
With the holidays fading away, Cashin’ In kicked off the new year with strong wins for both best hour and best day on Cable News Twitter, Saturday:
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This is the first weekend in a couple of weeks with a near normal schedule (and near normal hosts). Following Cashin’ In were both hours of The Melissa Harris-Perry Show (with Ms. Harris-Perry back at the anchor desk), although her two hours combined still brought in less Twitter mentions than the half-hour Cashin’ In did.
Raw data for the day: 2015-01-03-ShowStats.csv
Update 3/28/16:
I’m not sure why people keep tweeting links to this old article, but, really, there’s nothing worthwhile here other than a historical analysis of what people were talking about on cable news over a year ago. There is far more recent, and relevant, coverage of what’s happening at Seaworld elsewhere.
CNN’s perennial favorite documentary Blackfish, which was not shown, managed to pick up a huge amount of mentions on Cable News Twitter nonetheless as the topic has a life of its own, with over 40,000 mentions of #Blackfish. Mentions of Iran were in a distant second.
Since Blackfish is not currently being shown on CNN, I’ll kill the counts of it in subsequent analyses (unless/until CNN reruns it).
Raw Data: 2015-01-02-TagStats.csv and 2015-01-02-WordStats.csv