Hold off on awarding the Pulitzer Prize to Twitter, or to Sohaib Athar, the Pakistani man who unwittingly Tweeted details of the operation that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden, says Joe Flint in his Company Town blog.

What he was hearing, it turns out, was U.S. forces helicoptering in and out of Abbottabad. He had no idea that was what was going on, and he said as much in interviews after the raid and the discovery of his Tweets.

On his Sunday CNN show, Reliable Sources, looking at the media, host Howard Kurtz said of Athar: “I love the fact that this guy scoops the entire world.”

He did not scoop the entire world. He heard noise and posted something on Twitter about it. He didn’t know what the noise was, so how did he scoop the world? Even he acknowledged as much in an interview with NBC.

If Twitter had been around in November 1963 and a Dallas resident Tweeted, “Just heard gunshots,” would we say that person broke the story of the JFK assassination?

Fox News Channel’s America’s Newsroom and MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews continued to wrestle for third place on Experian Hitwise’s list of cable-news-show websites, with America’s Newsroom claiming the spot for the week ending April 30. The top two were unchanged for the third consecutive week: Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, and MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.

The top two late-night talk-show sites were also unchanged from the week ending April 23 — Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report — but TBS’ Conan surged into third place, bumping NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

As usual, there was no change in the morning-news-show rankings: NBC’s Today, ABC’s Good Morning America, and CBS’ The Early Show.

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C-SPAN said its YouTube video of President Barack Obama’s appearance at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner is now its most viewed ever, approaching 6 million views at the time of this post, despite only being available since late Saturday night.

The public-affairs network’s previous No. 1 YouTube video, of Obama’s inauguration speech in January 2009, has totaled more than 4.7 million views in two-and-a-half years.

Obama used the WHCD pulpit to poke fun at the debate over his birth certificate, entering to “I Am a Real American” by Rick Derringer and showing footage from The Lion King as his “birth video.”

Fox News Channel said its website was on track for a record number of video streams Monday, and a page-view record was a possibility, as well.

Sunday was FoxNews.com’s best Sunday in 2011 in terms of page views.

On the mobile front, from 10 p.m. ET Sunday to 1 a.m. Monday, the cable news network’s mobile presence totaled 5 million page views.

And on Facebook, Fox News totaled more than 64,000 likes and comments, with more than 45,000 of them attached to its post titled, “Breaking News: Osama Bin Laden is Dead, Fox News Confirms.”

The death of Osama Bin Laden topped the memorial service for Michael Jackson in terms of online video streams served by msnbc.com, as the site said it totaled more than 21 million for Monday as of 6 p.m. ET, topping the 19 million July 7, 2009, when the King of Pop was remembered.

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan holds the msnbc.com record, with more than 40 million streams.

As for Sunday, msnbc.com served more than 1.73 million online views of the announcement of Bin Laden’s death by President Barack Obama, and page views for the day were 38 percent above the site’s Sunday average.

ABC News said the hour between 11 p.m. ET and midnight Sunday, when news broke of the death of Osama Bin Laden, was its largest hour ever in terms of traffic, including its website, wireless site, and apps for the iPad, iPhone, and other smartphones.

The network added that Monday was the highest-trafficked day in the history of ABCNews.com, with a big push coming from its exclusive video from inside Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, which totaled more than 1 million views.

ABC News Digital senior vice president Joe Ruffolo said:

It has been an incredible day for ABC News, showing the enormous power of our newsgathering operations and our ability to translate and deliver that experience on-air, online, on phones, and wherever our users are. ABCNews.com was once again a leading destination in digital news, offering our users exclusive content, an enormous breadth and depth of reporting, and compelling video experiences.

CNN released some early statistics for its coverage of the death of Osama Bin Laden on CNN.com, CNN iReport, CNN Mobile, Facebook, and Twitter (@CNN and @cnnbrk).

CNN.com totaled 88 million global page views from the time news of Bin Laden’s death broke Sunday night through 1 p.m. ET Monday, 217 percent higher than the average for the same time period over the previous four weeks. The site also announced 13.8 million total global video starts (live and video-on-demand), up 725 percent versus the prior four-week average, and 2.6 million live video views, more than 100 times normal levels.

Citizen journalism initiative iReport received 407 submissions related to Bin Laden’s death, with 71 vetted for use on CNN’s platforms. The total was 35 percent higher than the first day of coverage of the earthquake in Japan.

CNN Mobile tallied 7.7 million global page views Sunday, 153 percent above the same-day average from the previous four weeks. Through 10 a.m. Monday, its global page view total was 5.1 million, up 146 percent versus the prior four Mondays. CNN Mobile’s 26,700 domestic video starts Sunday were 23 percent higher than the Sunday average for the past four weeks, and its 56,400 Monday through 10 a.m. were up 146 percent from the prior four Mondays.

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The top two cable-news-show websites for the week ending April 23 were unchanged from the previous week — Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor and MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show — while third place on the Experian Hitwise charts went to MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, which bumped Fox News’ America’s Newsroom off the list.

The late-night talk-show website order was unchanged from the week ending April 16: Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, trailed by NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

The morning news shows finished in their usual order: NBC’s Today, ABC’s Good Morning America, and CBS’ The Early Show.

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NBC News vice president of specials and digital media Mark Lukasiewicz touted the network’s The Royal Wedding by NBC News app, as well as Twitter account @RoyalWedding, in an internal email.

The app is available for the iPad, iPhone, and Android.

Lukasiewicz also mentioned a tie-in with entertainment-based social network GetGlue, as well as a special Facebook event. From his email:

In addition to the comprehensive coverage on NBC News, MSNBC, and our sister networks like E! Entertainment Television and Telemundo, we are expanding the Royal Wedding experience through our app, which we built to be the ideal companion to watching the event on TV. Combining all of our editorial research and news reports (both archive and new) with photos and social media, this app is the perfect tool for all things Royal Wedding. The app even lets you plan a viewing party with your friends and features daily updates. So far, the app has seen more than 110,000 downloads on iPad, iPhone, and Android, and we invite you to check it out!

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Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor was the top-ranked cable-news-show website for the week ending April 16, according to Experian Hitwise, with MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show coming in second, and third place going to Fox News’ America’s Newsroom.

The top-ranked late-night talk-show website was Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, followed by network sibling The Colbert Report, with the No. 3 spot going to NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

As usual, the morning news shows finished with NBC’s Today on top, followed by ABC’s Good Morning America, and CBS’ The Early Show.

See the results after the jump…

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