The Twitter spotlight on Morning Joe.
Ari MelberA lot of people hate on Twitter, and for good reason. One of its most interesting effects in media, however, is how live tweets can impact television commentators more than traditional methods of audience feedback.
In this recent clip on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe," for example, Mika Brzezinski anticipates Twittersphere blowback to a potential misreading of a comment by her co-host, Joe Scarborough:
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Scarborough was arguing that the political class’s obsession with social issues, like gay marriage and abortion, is detracting from the economic agenda, and he also did not want to be characterized as believing those social issues were not important at all.
The medium matters, though, because TV anchors are increasingly more responsive to their audience on Twitter than any other medium.
Scarborough posts about 16 messages per day on Twitter. He uses the service most for responding directly to viewers — about 63 percent of his tweets are replies (designated by the "@"). An analysis of Scarborough’s tweeting from TweetsStats.com shows that he posts the most messages in the 10am hour, which is just after his show ends.
While a TV host could also reply to viewer mail and email, that kind of one-to-one communication is time-prohibitive. And where two-line emails might seem curt, Twitter’s mandated brevity enables a different type of exchange, with feedback impacting how anchors and journalists approach their work, and their audience.
Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.