Eastwood and empty chair hijack media coverage

Reuters/Los Angeles

Actor Clint Eastwood, 82, talks to an imaginary President Barack Obama seated in an empty chair onstage at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Thursday. Eastwood endorsed presidential candidate Mitt Romney during his remarks

Months of careful planning for the Republican National Convention were hijacked by actor Clint Eastwood as traditional and social media erupted in a frenzy of scratched heads and parodies that experts said largely overshadowed presidential contender Mitt Romney’s moment in the spotlight.Eastwood’s rambling, unscripted address at Thursday’s convention to an absent President Barack Obama in an empty chair inspired an instant satirical Twitter account, @InvisibleObama, that quickly went viral, demonstrating the power of social media to upset tightly scripted image control.Although Romney notched up the most tweets during his keynote address to the convention in Tampa, Florida - more than 14,289 tweets per minute - his Twitter Political Index (Twindex), which measures how tweeters feel about a candidate on a scale of 1 to 100, fell from 46 to 38 following his speech.Some 30.3mn Americans watched Thursday’s prime time addresses on cable and broadcast television, according to final Nielsen data.But by Friday, it was Dirty Harry star Eastwood’s performance that was capturing the popular attention. The Twitter hashtag #eastwooding - mostly pictures of empty chairs - was also one of the top-trending topics on the microblogging site on Friday.Paul Levinson, professor of media and communication studies at Fordham University and author of the book New New Media, thought Eastwood’s performance was “the biggest story by far from the convention, including Romney’s speech.”“I don’t think what happened with Eastwood will be decisive in the presidential election, but I think that forever and anon, when people think about this convention, they are going to think about this empty chair and this octogenarian actor rambling on,” Levinson said.The @InvisibleObama parody account garnered more than 25,000 followers by the end of Romney’s speech, and by Friday afternoon it had some 55,000 followers.Eastwood’s address was also an instant hot topic on political blogs and on television following Romney’s address.CNN’s Wolf Blitzer called it embarrassing and “a horrible blunder” by the Republican .convention planners, while liberal-leaning MSNBC anchor Ed Schultz predicted that “tomorrow around the water cooler, it’s all about Clint Eastwood. He’s the big winner tonight.”Fox News Channel, which is popular with conservatives, lingered on TV images of Romney’s and vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s many children and grandchildren playing happily with some of the tens of thousands of red, white and blue balloons released at the end of the evening.But anchor Megyn Kelly also opined that “a lot of people will be talking about Clint Eastwood.”Marty Kaplan, professor of politics and pop culture at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, said Republican planners were likely regretting they had invited Eastwood to speak.“They’re having to spend a huge portion of the time that ought to be a celebration of (Romney’s) convention, and instead they’re doing damage control. It’s a distraction and I can’t imagine they’re happy about that,” Kaplan said.Perhaps fortunately for Romney, television audiences for Thursday were down sharply from the 2008 Republican convention, when little-known vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin captured the public imagination.Romney’s (and Eastwood’s) speech across 11 TV networks on the final night of the convention drew in about 8mn more viewers than tuned into the convention earlier in the week.But the Republicans lost almost 9mn TV viewers compared to the third night of the 2008 Republican gathering, with NBC down 56% and CNN losing 52% of their audience four years ago.