The Media Drop

When Dave Winer mentioned on Twitter that the ABC News / Facebook debates scheduled for January 5 weren’t broadcasting live on the West Coast, I thought it most certainly had to be a mistake.

Sure enough, you can see just that in the image (from ABC News / Politics) above. Just in case you thought maybe it was running later on the East Coast (like 7p, 10e), I’d say anything that said “7p/6c” probably does mean “7 Pacific / 6 Central.” To boot, this story closes with the timing of 7-8:30 pm ET for the Republican portion of the debate.

If you want confirmation, you can always check TV Guide, and put in any zip codes you want. 94101 works fine for San Francisco, for instance.

I’ve reached out to ABC News through its Website, and tried to comment on the aforementioned story, but haven’t had any luck with a response yet. If this is the case, it’s kind of an unfortunate situation, isn’t it? I mean, maybe there’s something else on the West Coast that people could potentially be watching, but is it going to get any better ratings - even at 4pm - than the debates would? And considering that it’s a *national* event that is live in nature, and has a Web component in its involvement with Facebook, this just doesn’t make sense.

[update] Dave Winer updates us all on Twitter, pointing to this liveblog by ABC’s Rick Klein, mentioning the specifics about ABC’s ability to show - or not - the feed, and how it’s the choices of the local affiliates to run it now or later. So maybe there’s hope after all.

[update 2] Live feed can be found here at WMUR, found via the ABC News blog.