Just like virtually every other point in the campaign that led up to it, this week’s U.S. election brought record levels of engagement on social media — Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. Twitter celebrated enduring the day without an outage, though Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz was less than impressed.
The other center of activity on Tuesday night was the television, where CNN dominated the competition in ratings and insight. Fox News provided the most memorable moment when Republican strategist and Fox analyst Karl Rove questioned the network’s call of Ohio for Obama based on his conversation with Romney staff. The episode led to questions about the role at Fox for Rove, who played a significant role in Romney’s campaign.
Observers disagreed about each medium’s usefulness for following big events like the election. At ReadWrite, Dan Frommer argued that Twitter is now the way to follow politics live, though BuzzFeed’s John Herrman said huge events simply overwhelm even the best-curated feeds. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo contrasted the speed and depth of TV with Twitter’s cacophony, observing that “the Web was full of what one usually finds on cable news: pointless bloviating peppered with unsubstantiated rumor.” Time’s James Poniewozik also made the case for TV’s continued political relevance.
Traditional news orgs showed a somewhat uncharacteristic amount of restraint in reporting election results: The TV networks agreed not to report early exit poll data in an attempt to wall themselves off from online web chatter, and The New York Times called the election for Obama nearly an hour after Obama himself did, a decision approved of by public editor Margaret Sullivan. The New York Times also dropped its paywall for the election, along with The Wall Street Journal. And in a pair of posts, Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman highlighted the most interesting innovations in election coverage.
There were a few insightful big-picture retrospectives on the campaign’s media angles, as well. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman called it “the nerdiest election ever,” and The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor said this campaign was marked by big media’s failure to hold the candidates accountable. The New York Times’ David Carr argued that the media certainly tried to call out campaigns on their factual inaccuracies, but the campaigns still managed to skate through with their falsehoods anyway. PolitiFact’s Bill Adair countered that Carr had unrealistic expectations for the fact-checking movement, saying, “Our mission is to inform readers, not change the behavior of politicians.”
Micah Sifry at Tech President wrote a smart analysis of the surprisingly lackluster role social media played in the campaign, though media prof Deen Freelon pulled together some fascinating large-scale data on the activity on Obama and Romney’s Facebook pages, from which The Atlantic’s Rebecca Rosen pulled out some initial nuggets. And here at the Lab, Ken Doctor looked at election results to draw some lessons from the Republican Party’s demographic decline for the future of the newspaper industry.