Ranking Member Orrin Hatch (R-UT) Shakes Hands with Roberts

Originally uploaded by ericaamerica08

There is a mega media merger on the horizon – and Capitol Hill is tuned in. Last Thursday the CEOs of Comcast and NBC Universal came to Washington to testify before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee and make a case for their joint $30B merger. Comcast is the country’s largest cable provider and NBC Universal is television’s top-rated network among the 18-49 age group. As reported by MSNBC, NBC Universal also includes “a major movie studio; a television production studio; a handful of cable TV channels including USA, Sci-Fi, CNBC and Bravo; and a group of 29 television stations.”

You can watch the entire webcast of the hearing here or watch Senator Franken’s style of questioning below. Finally, the Hill’s Kim Hart did a few posts on her blog here.

We all know by now what a magnifying impact Twitter, the micro blogging sensation, has had on politics. Capitol Hill is no exception. Here are some key highlights from the week of Twitter on the Hill.

Trending Topics this week, according to Tweet Congress, a web site dedicated to  tracking tweets from Members of Congress, include: #haiti, #morejobs, #hcr and #tcot. (TCOT = top conservatives on Twitter). Remember, hash tags are tools that help you to follow a conversation. So if a user uses #hrc in their 140 character update, it will funnel into a conversation thread with more #hcr.

Some interesting hash tags I found from Republicans include #repealit and #KilltheBill, no doubt in reference to health care. From the Democrats, at least this week, I found less Twitter output.  Their hashtags revolved around #haiti, #hcr and personal state hash tags such as #MO for Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO). It seems Republicans are finding more creative uses of hashtags, a smart and effective way of targeting messages…at least at this moment.

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I had some extra footage from my conversation with Helen Thomas on 2/19/09. In it, she talked tough to Republicans — “They drove us into the ground” — addressed the first credentialed blogger in the Press Corp, and shared her deepest concern for the crash of newspapers.