Author Archives: Nancy Watzman

About Nancy Watzman

Nancy Watzman is Managing Editor, Television Archive.

TV News Record: Six takeaways from adding Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama & more to Face-o-Matic facial detection

A round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman.

This week we release new data generated by our Face-o-Matic tool, developed in collaboration with Matroid, adding to our list of public figures detected by facial-recognition on major cable news stations on the  TV News Archive.

In addition to President Donald Trump and the four congressional leaders, the expanded list now includes most former living presidents and recent major party presidential contenders, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. (For the full list of public officials tracked, as well as methodical notes, see bottom of the post.)

Detecting faces on TV news and turning them into data provides a new quantitative path for journalists and researchers to explore how news is presented to the public and compare and contrast editorial choices that individual networks make. This new measure shows us the duration that politicians’ faces are actually shown on screen, whether it’s a clip of that person speaking, muted footage, or a still photo shown in the background to illustrate a point.

Adding to the Television Explorer, fueled by closed captions and our Third Eye chyron reading tool, a wealth of information is now available to analyze. (See the TV News Archive home page for examples of visualizations created by journalists and researchers using TV News Archive data.)

Here are six quick takeaways using Face-o-Matic for an analysis covering roughly six months, from November 2017 through May 2018, looking at four cable TV news networks: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.

Download Face-o-Matic data to explore your own research questions.

1. Trump trumps every other political figure in face-time on cable TV news, all the time, every day, in every way, on every network and program.

As we’ve seen in past analyses with Face-o-Matic data, President Donald Trump is the major political star on cable TV news as compared to other top political figures examined. To put this in perspective: over a six month period stretching from November 2017 to May 2018, the president’s face appeared on TV cable news the equivalent of a full 13.5 days, counting every second of face-time. The next closest political figure we analyzed was House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., whose visage appeared the equivalent of one day.


  1. After Trump, GOP leaders in Congress are the most popular faces on TV cable news.

The two GOP leaders in Congress, Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky. are the next most popular faces on TV news cable news networks. Between the two, Ryan ranks first on the TV news cable networks we examined: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.  McConnell is the next most shown face on these networks, with the exception of BBC News.

Link to interactive version of above chart, where view can be changed to exclude specific politicians.

  1. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama figure prominently on Fox News.

Fox News airs proportionately more images of failed presidential candidate 2016 Hillary Clinton and former president Barack Obama than other cable TV news networks. Fox News showed Clinton’s face 7.6 times more than CNN did, and Obama’s 3.6 times more. Fox News also showed Clinton 3.6 times more than MSNBC, and Obama, 2.3 times more.


  1. Hannity shows more Hillary Clinton face-time than any other top-rated Fox News show.

Not only does the Fox News “Hannity” program air more images of Hillary Clinton proportionately than any other top rated Fox News show, with just one exception, it is the Fox News show that shows her face more than current congressional leaders–Ryan, McConnell, Schumer or Pelosi. “Hannity” also shows more images of Obama than other top rated Fox News shows.

Link to interactive version of above chart, where view can be changed to exclude specific politicians.

  1. Ryan face-time spikes on news shows aired during morning hours.

All three U.S. cable news networks examined showed high rates of face-time for Ryan on shows airing during morning hours, ranging from 9 am to 11 am. This may be linked to his leadership role in Congress and that morning hours are prime for large announcements. For example, on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” and “Happening Now” show spikes of face-time for Ryan. On MSNBC, “Live with Hallie Jackson” and “Live with Velshi and Ruhle” show high rates of images for Ryan. And on CNN, “At This Hour with Kate Bolduan” shows high rates of Ryan as well. 

Links to interactive charts for top-rated news shows; view can be adjusted to exclude specific politicians. The source for top-rated shows is shows with 2017 top viewership by Nielsen.

Top-rated Fox News shows.

Top-rated MSNBC news shows.

Top-rated CNN shows.

  1. BBC News just isn’t that into us.

BBC News provides a window into how news is presented to a major foreign audience. Like U.S. cable news networks, BBC News features more face-time for Trump than other political figures examined. Ryan ranks a distant second. Overall, BBC News, however, shows much lower rates of images of U.S. political figures than U.S. cable news shows do.

Link to interactive version of above chart, where view can be changed to exclude specific politicians.

Methodological notes

The Face-o-Matic data set, available for download on the Internet Archive, uses facial recognition to track the faces of prominent public officials as they appear on major cable TV news networks: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. The list of public officials tracked, along with the date that detection began, is here:

President & current congressional leaders

President Donald Trump, 7/13/17

Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., 7/13/17

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., 7/13/17

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., 7/13/17

Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, D., N.Y., 7/13/17

Former living presidents and recent major party presidential candidates*

George H.W. Bush, 10/5/17

George W. Bush, 11/1/17

Jimmy Carter, 10/21/17

Bill Clinton, 9/12/17

Hillary Clinton, 9/12/17

Barack Obama, 7/13/17

Mitt Romney, 10/4/17

*Note: Our data set does not include Sen. John McCain, R., Ariz., who ran for president opposite Obama in 2008. Sample testing of facial detection for the senator revealed a somewhat frequent rate of false positives  – instances where the identified face was not the senator’s, but rather one of a number of lookalikes. While we make no claim that all of the detections in the Face-o-matic data set are error free, we did test faces to minimize these. Please be sure to notify us if you find errors in the data.

TV News Record: Recognizing Trump’s voice on TV, NYT & Axios coverage, + Ryan fact-check

A round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman.

This week we explore cutting edge work by Joostware that moves us closer to solving the challenge of searching vast archives of video by speaker, note the use of TV News Archive data by The New York Times and Axios, and share a fact-checked interview by exiting House Speaker Paul Ryan about his legacy.

Joostware trained model to recognize Trump’s voice

What if you wanted to search the TV News Archive to find every instance where President Donald Trump is talking?

That’s the research question that the San Francisco-based firm Joostware concentrated on for its Who Said What project, which won a $50,000 prototype grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Last week Joostware’s founder, Delip Rao, presented the project’s progress at a gathering in Austin, Texas. (The Internet Archive’s own Dan Schultz, in his Bad Idea Factory incarnation, also presented on Contextubot, which we recently profiled here.)

Audio and video today is viewed as an opaque object and it’s meant for linear consumption,” Rao said in his presentation. “But truly any audio and video especially in the context of news has a lot of structure to it. There are speakers of interest, and these speakers take turns, and then within each turn something was communicated. So our goal is to identify these speakers who are of interest and also the content that was spoken in that turn and indexing that.

Anyone can search the TV News Archive already via closed captions at the Internet Archive or via Television Explorer. Our experiments with facial detection and chyron extraction are another way to find and analyze news clips. But searching a video archive by “speaker id” – finding all the video where a person is actually talking – is a tough technical challenge. Our Trump Archive and congressional, executive branch, and administration archives are all manually curated video collections designed to demonstrate what it would be like to have automated speaker id search.

Joostware researchers have made progress toward this goal. They took material from the Trump Archive, and used it to train a model that recognizes the president’s voice, by using properties of the voice signal. They created a prototype search software that is more than 95% accurate on a human annotated dataset in returning video clips where Trump is actually speaking.

What’s next? With more resources, Joostware hopes to give this technology back to the Internet Archive to improve search within the TV News Archive. And Rao and others continue to work within the larger community of researchers working to crack the code of video to help fact-checkers and journalists hold power accountable.

No one is talking about tax law on cable TV news

Jim Tankersley and Karl Russell, reporters for The New York Times, used TV News Archive captions via GDELT’s Television Explorer to demonstrate how little coverage there is on cable TV news for the newly minted $2.5 trillion tax overhaul:

“Consider one of Mr. Trump’s preferred yardsticks: cable news coverage. Throughout the fall, as Republicans rushed their tax bill through Congress in two breakneck months, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC routinely devoted 10 percent of their daily coverage to tax issues, according to data from the Gdelt Project. Interest spiked as Mr. Trump signed the bill in late December, and then it fell precipitously.”

“Stormy Daniels wins TV war: overshadows taxes, health care”

For Axios, Caitlin Owens used TV New Archive data with GDELT’s Television Explorer to shed light on whether the TV networks are paying attention the priorities of the political parties: “Tax cuts and the Affordable Care Act are supposed to be big issues in the midterm elections, but both have faded from the attention of the cable news networks now that they’re no longer front and center in Congress.” Owens thinks it matters because “Democrats are campaigning hard on the GOP’s unpopular attempt to repeal and replace the ACA, and Republicans are pushing the financial benefits of their tax law.”


Fact-Check: Corporate tax revenues are rising (misleading)

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wisc., announced last week he would not be seeking reelection, prompting television interviews that reflected on his legacy. In a “Meet the Press” interview Sunday on NBC, host Chuck Todd asked Ryan to respond to a statement by Sen. Bob Corker, R., Tenn.:

“’This Congress and this administration likely will go down as one of the most fiscally irresponsible administrations and Congresses that we ever had.’ And he’s referring to the fact that this tax bill spiked the deficit. It’s higher than even what was projected.” Ryan responded “That was going to happen. The baby boomers’ retiring was going to do that. These deficit trillion-dollar projections have been out there for a long, long time. Why? Because of mandatory spending, which we call entitlements. Discretionary spending under the CBO baseline is going up about $300 billion over the next 10 years. Tax revenues are still rising. Income tax revenues are still rising. Corporate income tax revenues. Corporate rate got dropped 40 percent, still rising.”

Eugene Kiely reported for FactCheck.org that “Ryan is right that $1 trillion deficit projections ‘have been out there for a long, long time…But corporate tax revenues are down for the first six months of the fiscal year, and they are projected to be less over the next 10 years than they otherwise would have been because of the law.”

Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly reported for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, “The baby-boom generation is retiring, and Congress at best has taken only modest steps to rein in spending on old-age programs, largely because any serious effort is met with hostility and often-misleading attack ads…But the revenue side of the picture cannot be ignored.” “Congress has not been able to grapple with the spending — and  keeps taking steps to undermine the revenue flow as well.”

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TV News Record: Caption analyses, plus fact-checks on wall & immigrants

A round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman.

This week we bring you analyses of cable TV news coverage and fact-checks of recent statements by President Donald Trump on immigration and his proposed wall on the border with Mexico.

Vox & Post turn TV news captions into media analysis

Vox’s Alvin Chang and The Washington Post’s Philip Bump continue to turn TV News Archive caption data, via Television Explorer, into analyses of current news. Chang analyzes cable TV network coverage of the March for Our Lives, an anti-gun violence demonstration, reporting that on Fox News, “There was a massive spike in mentions of the “Second Amendment” or “Constitution” during the peak of the march, and most of those mentions came from pundits and guests on the network.”

Source: Vox

Bump’s piece examines mentions of Hillary Clinton on cable TV news networks compared to those of Stormy Daniels, the adult entertainer involved in a legal dispute with the president. He finds that Fox News mentions Clinton the most, while CNN features more coverage of Daniels.

Source: The Washington Post

Fact-Check: We’ve started building the wall (Mostly False/Three Pinocchios)

During a press conference with the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, President Donald Trump talked about his proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico: “We have to have strong borders. We need the wall. We’ve started building the wall, as you know, we have a $1.6 billion toward building the wall and fixing existing wall that’s falling down, it was never appropriate in the first place.”

The funding the president references comes from a spending bill recently passed by Congress. The omnibus “bill included $1.6 billion for some projects at the border, but none of that can be used toward the border wall promised during the presidential campaign.” For PolitiFact, Miriam Valverde rates the president’s claim “Mostly False.”

At The Washington Post’s Fact-Checker, Glenn Kessler gives the same claim “three Pinocchios”:

The White House failed miserably to achieve its objectives on funding for a border wall, receiving relative peanuts. It sought $25 billion, but ended up with just 5 percent of that. Moreover, the money came with strings attached so that it could only be used for fencing, not the “great” and “beautiful wall” promised by Trump.

In Orwellian fashion, fences have now become walls. Even then, the president has only secured enough money to pay for one-tenth of the new fence/wall he has sought.


Fact-Check: Caravans of people are coming to cross the U.S.-Mexico border (Half True)

Just after Fox News aired a segment on a caravan of people from Central America making its way through Mexico toward the United States, the president wrote on Twitter:

“Half True,” writes W. Gardner Shelby for PolitiFact: “President Trump tweeted that caravans of immigrants are coming to the Mexico-U.S. border… We confirmed that a caravan of 1,200 to 1,500 people from Central America–not caravans–was in southern Mexico, about 900 miles from the Rio Grande, when Trump tweeted. Also, accounts vary on whether all participants are bound to enter the U.S. An organizer estimated that most of the people intend to remain in Mexico.”

Reporting for FactCheck.org, Robert FarleyEugene Kiely and Lori Robertson write “Trump’s messages included muddled and inaccurate claims.” They summarize with the following bullet points:

  • Contrary to Trump’s assertion, there is no “liberal (Democrat)” law requiring the “Catch & Release” of people caught illegally crossing the border. There are court cases and laws that require some unaccompanied children, families and asylum-seekers to be released in the U.S., pending an immigration hearing. But it’s a stretch to blame those entirely on Democrats.

  • Trump said “big flows of people” are illegally entering the U.S. from Mexico “to take advantage of DACA.” In fact, current border-crossers are not eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

  • Trump said that “caravans” of people were coming to the Southwest border and that Mexico “must stop them.” The caravan, a yearly demonstration, was organized by the activist group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which says the people walking in the caravan have “a lot of intentions,” with some wanting to stay in Mexico. The caravan is now in southern Mexico, more than 800 miles from the U.S. border.

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TV News Record: How cable TV news reports news, fact-checks on banking, trade, and public lands

A round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman.

This week, we present a Washington Post analysis of coverage of an alleged affair by the president; a Vox piece examining coverage of Andrew McCabe, the former deputy FBI director; and The Toronto Star’s use of a salient clip to illustrate a point about a presidential appointment. We also show fact-checks from FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post’s Fact-Checker on claims related to banking, public lands, and trade policy.

Chicken-egg question on cable news coverage of alleged affair

CNN and MSNBC hosts and guests are talking a lot more about the alleged past affair between President Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels than Fox News is, according to Philip Bump’s latest analysis for The Washington Post using TV News Archive data via Television Explorer. 

Bump used the analysis as context to dig into a poll released by Suffolk University earlier this month: “One-fifth of Americans said that Fox News was the news or commentary source they trusted the most, a group that was primarily made up of Republicans… There’s a chicken-egg question here. Does Fox give the Stormy Daniels story a light touch because its audience is largely supportive of Trump or is Fox’s audience largely supportive of Trump because of the coverage they see on Fox? Or is it both?”

Did Fox News reporting contribute to perception of fired FBI official?

Vox’s Alvin Chang argues a connection between the firing of Andrew McCabe, former FBI deputy director, to a narrative built up over the course of months by Fox News. Using TV News Archive data via Television Explorer, Chang reports that “long before he was fired, Fox News… constantly referred to McCabe as the quintessential example of the FBI’s corruption and anti-Trump bias. They hinted that he was plotting several schemes against Trump during the election, leaking information to the press, and was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and Democrats.” This, he writes, allowed FOX News viewers to think it made “perfect sense for Attorney General Jeff Sessions (perhaps directed by Trump) to fire McCabe.” Chang goes on to warn, “This alternate reality is being fed into the president’s mind.”


What new presidential economic pick had to say about Canadian PM

The Toronto Star embedded a TV news clip in a piece on Trump’s pick to replace his economic advisor. Larry Kudlow, who is taking over from Gary Cohn as economic advisor, had said of U.S. trade policy:  “NAFTA is the key. And unfortunately we’re going after a major NAFTA ally, and perhaps America’s greatest ally, namely Canada. Even with this left-wing crazy guy Trudeau, they’re still our pals. They’re still our pals. Why are we going after them?” The clip has been viewed more than 112,000 times and counting.


Fact-Check: Senate banking bill a big win for Wall Street (Yes and No)

In a floor speech, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D., Mass., said of the latest proposal to make changes to Dodd-Frank, “This bill is about goosing the bottom line and executive bonuses at the banks that make up the top one half of 1 percent of banks in this country by size. The very tippy-top.”

Manuela Tobias reported for PolitiFact: “The bill raises the bar of what is considered a big bank five-fold, which effectively relaxes the standards for large regional banks. Experts warn this also could open a door for bigger Wall Street bank giveaways.

The bill also has a few provisions affecting banks above $250 billion in assets. However, the effects would largely depend on the Federal Reserve’s interpretation of the law. The biggest banks might be able to get relaxed regulations, but then again, they might not.”


Fact-Check: Public lands proposal largest in history (False)

In a Senate hearing on the budget for the Dept. of the Interior, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said the president’s proposal “is the largest investment in our public lands infrastructure in our nation’s history. Let me repeat that, this is the largest investment in our public lands infrastructure in the history of this country.”

PolitiFact rates the claim false. Louis Jacobson reported: “It’s far from assured that the maximum figure of $18 billion in the proposal will ever be reached if enacted. Beyond that, though, Roosevelt’s $3 billion investment in the Civilian Conservation Corps would amount to $53 billion today, and it accounted for vastly more than the Trump proposal as a percentage of federal spending at the time.”

Fact-Check: U.S. has trade deficit with Canada (Four Pinocchios)

After a private meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump defended his view about U.S.-Canada trade, tweeting, “We do have a Trade Deficit with Canada, as we do with almost all countries (some of them massive). P.M. Justin Trudeau of Canada, a very good guy, doesn’t like saying that Canada has a Surplus vs. the U.S.(negotiating), but they do … they almost all do … and that’s how I know!”

Glenn Kessler reports for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker that the president is not including services in his analysis of the trade relationship with Canada. He adds: “The president frequently suggests the United States is losing money with these deficits, but countries do not ‘lose’ money on trade deficits. A trade deficit simply means that people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first.” Kessler gives the claim four Pinocchios.

Eugene Kiely reports for FactCheck.org that the president’s claim that figures giving the U.S. a trade surplus with Canada are not including timber and energy is “not accurate. The Census Bureau, which is within the U.S. Department of Commerce, said its trade figures do include timber and energy and referred us to two publications that show that the agency does include timber and energy for imports and exports.”

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TV News Record: Glorious ContextuBot making progress

A round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman.

This week, we present an update on the video context project Glorious Contextubot, two recent news reports that use TV News Archive data, and fact-checks of TV appearances by the DNC chair and the president.

Fueled by TV News Archive, the Glorious Contextubot is making progress

Let’s say a friend posts a YouTube video link to a politician’s statement on Facebook, but you have a feeling it’s taken out of context. The clip is tightly edited, and you’re curious to see the rest of the statement. Was the politician answering a question? Was the statement part of a larger discussion?

Enter the Glorious ContextuBot. For the past nine months, veteran media innovators Mark Boas and Laurian Gridnoc of Hyperaudio and Trint, led by the Internet Archive’s own Dan Schultz, senior creative technologist of the TV News Archive, have been building a prototype of the Contextubot, fueled by the TV News Archive. The Contextubot is one of 20 winners of the Knight Prototype Fund’s $1 million challenge, announced in June 2017.

With the ContextuBot, it’s possible to use video to search video. Just paste a link to a video snippet into an interface and then pull up a transcript that puts things in context of what came before and after. Built from the Duplitron 5000, an audio fingerprinting tool Schultz developed to track political ads for the Political TV Ad Archive, the ContextuBot demonstrates how open technology built by the TV team can be repurposed and improved by motivated technologists – one that’s already captured the attention of the University of Iowa Informatics department, which is considering adopting it for researchers.

To date, the team has:

  • Made it easier to scale audio search. It’s now possible to scale up and down audio fingerprint finding within a corpus of TV news by adding or removing individual computers or compute clusters.  Our Duplitron would take eight hours to search a year of television, but the ContextuBot makes it much easier to spread that computing across multiple machines.
  • Built a demo interface. You can see a clip in context with a transcript of what comes before and after. Click on a word in the transcript, and you’ll be able to jump to that point in the video stream.
  • Begun to explore a “comic view.”  The team’s biggest goal is to explore ways to communicate the essence of a longer clip in a short amount of time.  One approach: converting video into a comic. This would set the groundwork for automatically extracting (and rendering) a storyboard from a video clip.

The team will present the prototype shortly before the International Symposium of Online Journalism conference in Austin in April 2018.


The Washington Post finds stark differences in cable TV coverage of Jared Kushner

After a heavy news week of developments related to Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior adviser, The Washington Post’s Philip Bump dug into the TV News Archive and found that while MSNBC and CNN had numerous mentions of Kushner’s name, Fox News had just ten.


The Washington Post examines coverage of Parkland shooting

Rachel Siegal used the TV News Archive to compare coverage of the Parkland shooting with several other high-profile shootings, and found that this time cable TV attention spans are a bit longer.


Fact-Check: the DNC raised record-making amounts in January. (Two Pinocchios)

In a recent interview, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said, “We raised more money in January… of 2018 than any January in our history. So if the question is, ‘Do we have enough money to implement our game plan?’ Absolutely.”

This claim earned “two Pinocchios” from Salvador Rizzo, reporting for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker:  the “DNC raised $6 million in January 2018… That was below what it raised in January 2014 ($6.6 million), January 2012 ($13.2 million), January 2011 ($7.1 million) and January 2010 ($9.1 million).”  A spokesman for Perez “backed off from those comments when we reached out with FEC figures that told a different story.”


Fact-Check: Congressman fears NRA downgrade for gun legislation (misleading)

In a meeting with lawmakers to talk gun legislation, President Donald Trump suggested that an age requirement increase for purchasing guns was not included in a 2013 reform effort by Rep. Pat Toomey, R., Pa., “because you’re afraid of the NRA, right?”

Reporting by FactCheck.org’s Eugene Kiley, Lori Robertson, and Robert Farley calls this statement misleading.  “As a result of the legislation, Toomey’s rating with the NRA dropped from an “A” to a “C,” and the endorsements and contributions Toomey got from the NRA in previous House and Senate races disappeared. In 2016, the NRA stayed out of Toomey’s Senate race altogether; his Democratic opponent, Katie McGinty, had an “F” grade from the NRA. In that race, Toomey got the endorsement of a gun-control group, Everytown for Gun Safety, which ran ads supporting him.”


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TV News Record: Television Explorer 2.0, shooting coverage & more

A round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman. 

Explore Television Explorer 2.0

Television Explorer, a tool to search closed captions from the TV News Archive, keeps getting better. Last week GDELT’s Kalev Leetaru added new and improved features:

  • 163 channels are now available to search, from C-Span to Al Jazeera to Spanish language content from Univision and Telemundo.
  • Results now come as a percentage of 15 second clips, making comparisons between simpler.
  • The context word function for searches is similarly redesigned, counting a matching 15-second clip as well searching the 15 second clips immediately before and after, helping to alleviate some previous issues with overcounting.
  • You can now see normalization timelines on the site, with newly available data about the total number of 15-second clips monitored each day and hour included in your query.

Take the revamped Television Explorer for a spin.

Here’s what we found when we used the new tools to track the use of the term, “cryptocurrency.” The rapid ascent, and sometimes fall, of the value of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have led to rises and dips in TV news coverage as well. In May 2017, international TV news channels began to run stories featuring the term, rapidly increasing in November and peaking just last week with BBC News. Television Explorer shows that Deutsche Welle led the pack ahead of BBC News and Al Jazeera in covering cryptocurrency. Among US networks, Bloomberg uses the term more than twice as often as Deutsche Welle. A search of the term bitcoin shows a similar trajectory, with CNBC coverage spiking December 11, 2017, a few days before bitcoin hit its historic peak in value to date.

Florida high school shooting TV news coverage shows familiar pattern

Within a broader analysis of how responses to the most recent school shooting compare with others, The Washington Post’s Philip Bump used TV News Archive closed caption data using GDELT’s Television Explorer to examine the pattern of use of the term “gun control” on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. “After the mass shooting in Las Vegas last October, a political discussion about banning ‘bump stocks’ — devices that allowed the shooter to increase his rate of fire — soon collapsed.” “So far, the conversation after Parkland looks similar to past patterns.”

Washington Post graphic

Fact-check: Trump never said Russia didn’t meddle in election (Pants on Fire!)

“I never said Russia did not meddle in the election”

Reacting to the indictments of Russian nationals by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, President Donald Trump wrote, “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, I said, ‘It may be Russia, or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.’ The Russian “hoax” was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia – it never did!”

Fact-checkers moved quickly to investigate this claim.

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler: “According to The Fact Checker’s database of Trump claims, Trump in his first year as president then 44 more times denounced the Russian probe as a hoax or witch hunt perpetuated by Democrats. For instance, here’s a tweet from the president after reports emerged about the use of Facebook by Russian operatives, a key part of the indictment: ‘The Russia hoax continues, now it’s ads on Facebook. What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary?’”

PolitiFact’s Jon Greenberg:  “Pants on Fire!” The president “called the matter a ‘made-up story,’ and a ‘hoax.’ He has said that he believes Russian President Putin’s denial of any Russian involvement. He told Time, ‘I don’t believe they (Russia) interfered.’”

Vox on Fox (& CNN & MSNBC): Mueller indictment, Florida shooting

In an analysis of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC during the 72 hours following the announcement of the indictment of 13 Russians, Vox’s Alvin Chang used TV News Archive closed captioning data and the GDELT Project’s Television Explorer to show “how Fox News spun the Mueller indictment and Florida shooting into a defense of the president.” Chang uses the data to show that “[I]nstead of focusing on the details of the indictment itself, pundits on Fox News spent a good chunk of their airtime pointing out that this isn’t proof of the Trump administration colluding with Russia.”


TV news coverage and analysis in one place

Scholars, pundits, and reporters have used the data we’ve created here in the TV News Archive in ways that continue to inspire us, adding much-needed context to our chaotic public discourse as seen on TV.  All that content is now in one place, showcasing the work of these researchers and reporters who turned TV news data into something meaningful.

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TV News Record: New search, important data, & more fact-checks

A round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman. Additional research by Robin Chin.

This week we present new TV news search features, inventory data of TV news recordings from GDELT, and the State of the Union, fact-checked by national fact-checking partners.

New TV news search features

We’re pleased to announce new search options on the TV News Archive, making it easier to find what you’re looking for, as well as integrating TV news material into global search at the Internet Archive. The work of TV Architect Tracey Jaquith, and designed by Carolyn Li-Madeo, these new features include:

Search TV news captions directly from Archive.org. “Search TV news captions” is now a selectable item on the main search bar at the Internet Archive. You no longer need to start from the TV News Archive home page.

Or, search from TV News Archive home page.  You can also search from the TV News Archive website homepage: archive.org/tv. Click on “Advanced Search” to drill down into the details.

Toggle between video thumbnails and text view. Don’t want to see video screenshots when you enter a search term? We now offer the ability to choose a “text view” that provides search results in a list format. Click on the text box icon on the upper right hand side of search results to switch to text view.

Search more than one facet at a time. Now you can select more than one TV program at a time to refine your search, as well as click multiple options for search for other attributes, such as topics and subjects.

More facets viewable. You’ll also see longer lists of available facets when you click on the “More” option.

New sort options. There are new sort options. For example, click on “views” to see TV news clips that have been viewed the most on the Internet Archive.

Dig in, and tell us what you think!

For power users, GDELT now offers downloadable historical inventory of TV News Archive recordings

If you are doing an advanced analysis of captioning or other TV News Archive metadata, it can be helpful to know the exact TV News Archive recordings on a given date and time. Thanks to data scientist Kalev Leetaru, this information is now available on GDELT in a downloadable format.

“Inevitably with an archive this massive spanning back to 2009 there will be brief outages or other disruptions and some stations may be monitored for only a specific period of time (such as adding local stations in key markets during specific months of a national election cycle),” writes Leetaru.

Knowing the exact broadcasts captured can help analysts who want to make sure a trend they are seeing – for example, a big dip or large increase in mentions of a particular term – is a valid trend or a reflection of outages or new stations added over a specific time period.

You can download all CSV files via the following URL (replace YYYYMMDD with the date of interest):

  • http://data.gdeltproject.org/gdeltv3/iatv/inventory/YYYYMMDD.inventory.csv

For example, to request the inventory of shows monitored on the very first official day of the Archive’s existance, use the URL http://data.gdeltproject.org/gdeltv3/iatv/inventory/20090616.inventory.csv or to request the inventory for February 2, 2018, use the URL http://data.gdeltproject.org/gdeltv3/iatv/inventory/20180202.inventory.csv.

Read the blog post here:  https://blog.gdeltproject.org/television-explorer-new-inventory-tables/

State of the Union 2018, fact-checked

The 2018 State of the Union is in the history books now – and preserved now on the TV News Archive, with links to 26 fact-checked clips (48 total fact-checks) by the TV News Archive’s fact-checking partners: FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker.

You can see fact-checks marked in context with the red check mark, or view them on this table of fact-checked items.

For example, all three fact-checking organizations checked President Donald Trump’s statement, “We enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history.”

  • PolitiFact: “In inflation-adjusted dollars, the recent tax bill is the fourth-largest since 1940. And as a percentage of GDP, it ranks seventh. We rate the statement False.”
  • FactCheck.org: “CRFB [Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget] said the tax cut in 1981 under President Ronald Reagan, at 2.9 percent of GDP, is the largest in history.”
  • WaPo: “Trump’s tax cut is only the eighth-largest — and is even smaller than two of Barack Obama’s tax cuts.”

And here’s a fact-check of the Democratic rebuttal of the SOTU by Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D., Mass. Kennedy, when he said: “We choose an economy strong enough to boast record stock prices and brave enough to admit that top CEOs making 300 times the average worker is not right.”

  • WaPo: “What Kennedy leaves out is that the EPI study is updated annually, and in the most recent version, covering 2016, the ratio between CEO and worker pay at the top 350 companies had declined somewhat, to 271 to 1. In making his point, Kennedy accurately refers only to the ‘top CEOs.’ But it’s important to note that he is presenting an outdated snapshot of only one year (2013) and that the EPI study is not the only research on this subject. Similar data from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg show that the ratio between what top CEOs and their workers make is closer to 200 to 1.”
  • PolitiFact: “His numbers describing today’s ratio, while credible, are on the high side of research. The AFL-CIO put the ratio at 347-to-1. The liberal Economic Policy Institute said CEOs make either 271 or 224 times that of average employees, depending on how you measure stock options. Bloomberg pegged the ratio at 265-to-1.” PolitiFact rated the claim Mostly True.

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TV News Record: State of the Union, past and future

A round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman. Additional research by Robin Chin.

When President Donald Trump takes the podium to deliver his first official State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, January 30,  he’ll be following in the footsteps of the nation’s very first president, George Washington, long before there was cable TV or radio.

In Washington’s time, the speech was not yet known as the State of the Union, but the annual message, and according to Donald Ritchie, former U.S. Senate historian, seen here in a clip from C-Span, the practice was “to [physically] cut the State of the Union message up into paragraphs and create committees to address each one of the issues the president suggested.” There were no standing committees in Congress at that time. Now it’s fact-checkers who examine the speech, line by line, and since 2017, we’ve been annotating our TV news programs with fact-checks of Trump, top administration officials, and the four top congressional leaders, Democrat and Republican.

Make history by being a beta tester of FactStream, a new free app for iPhone or iPad, which will deliver live fact-checks of Trump’s State of the Union address from national fact-checking organizations. The app is a product of Duke Reporters Lab Tech & Check collective, of which the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive is a member. We’ll be adding the fact-checks to the TV News Archive, too.

At the TV News Archive, we’ve got historical footage of some past State of the Union addresses, listed below. Last year we annotated Trump’s address to Congress – not officially a State of the Union, since he was newly inaugurated – with fact-checks from our fact-checking partners, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. Fact-checks are noted with a red check mark on the TV News Archive filmstrip screen.

For example, the above segment of Trump’s 2017 speech, marked with a red check mark, was fact-checked by both PolitiFact and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. Trump said, “According to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.”

PolitiFact’s Miriam Valverde rated this claim as “mostly false”: “Trump’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.” Michelle Ye Hee Lee, writing for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave the claim “four Pinocchios,” stating it relied on “a grossly exaggerated misuse of federal data.”

Past State of the Union addresses

2016: Barack Obama

2015: Barack Obama

2014: Barack Obama

2013: Barack Obama

2012: Barack Obama

2011: Barack Obama

2010: Barack Obama

1995: Bill Clinton

1988: Ronald Reagan (no closed captioning)

1980: Jimmy Carter  (no closed captioning)

1975:  Gerald Ford

1969: Lyndon Johnson

1965: Lyndon Johnson

1963: John F. Kennedy (no closed captioning)

1961: John F. Kennedy (no closed captioning)

1942: Franklin D. Roosevelt (no closed captioning)

TV News Record: The year in TV news visualizations

Thanks for being part of our community at the TV News Archive. As 2017 draws to a close, we’ve chosen six of our favorite visualizations using TV News Archive data. We look forward to assisting many more journalists and researchers in what will likely be an even more tumultuous news year. 

The New York Times: Mueller indictments

The New York Times editorial page used our Third Eye chyron collection to produce an analysis of TV news coverage of major indictments of Trump campaign officials by special counsel Robert Mueller: “The way each network covered the story – or avoided it – is a sign of how the media landscape has become ever more politicized in the Trump era. ”

credit: Taylor Adams, Jessia Ma, and Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times, “Trump Loves Fox & Friends,” November 1, 2017.

FiveThirtyEight: hurricane coverage

Writing for FiveThirtyEight.com, Dhrumil Mehta demonstrated that TV news broadcasters paid less attention to Puerto Rico’s hurricane Maria than to hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which hit mainland U.S. primarily in Texas and Florida. Mehta used TV News Archive data via Television Explorer.

credit: Dhrumil Mehta, “The Media Really Has Neglected Puerto Rico,” FiveThirtyEight, September 28, 2017.

TV News Archive: face-time for lawmakers

Using our Face-o-Matic data set, we found that Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., gets the most face-time on cable TV news, and MSNBC features his visage more than the other networks examined. Fox News features the face of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., more than any other cable network.

Vox:  Mueller’s credibility

Vox’s Alvin Chang used Television Explorer to explore how Fox News reports on Mueller’s credibility. This included showing how often Fox news mentioned Mueller in the context of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Alvin Chang, “A week of Fox News transcripts shows how they began questioning Mueller’s credibility,” Vox, October 31, 2017.

The Trace: coverage of shootings

Writing for The Trace, Jennifer Mascia presented findings from Television Explorer showing how coverage of shootings declines rapidly: “Two days after 26 people were massacred in a Texas church, the incident — one of the worst mass shootings in American history — had nearly vanished from the major cable news networks.”

Credit: Jennifer Mascia, “Data Shows Shrinking Cable News Cycles for This Fall’s Mass Shootings,” The Trace, December 5, 2017.

The Washington Post: What TV news networks covered in 2017

Philip Bump of The Washington Post crunched Television Explorer data to look at coverage of eleven major news stories by five national news networks. Here’s his visualization of TV news coverage of “sexual assault,” which shows how coverage increased at the end of the year as dozens of prominent men in media, politics, and entertainment were accused of sexual harassment or assault.

Philip Bump, “What national news networks were talking about during 2017, The Washington Post, December 15, 2017.

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TV News Record: Face-o-Matic on Trump, McConnell, and Pelosi; PolitiFact picks “2017 Lie of the Year”

A biweekly round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman.

This week we take a dive into nearly six months of Face-o-Matic facial recognition data. We also display the news clips behind PolitiFact’s top picks for lies and misstatements of the year, most of them seen and heard on TV news.

Face-o-Matic reveals cable news persistent patterns

With nearly six-months of data available, we’re finding certain persistent patterns on how cable networks make editorial choices in displaying the faces of President Donald Trump and top congressional leaders on TV screens.

First, Trump trumps the congressional leaders for on-screen face time, by many degrees of magnitude.

 

Second, of the four congressional leaders, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., gets the most face-time on TV, and MSNBC features his visage more than the other networks examined. Fox News features the face of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif. more than any other cable network.

Face-o-Matic, an experimental service, developed in collaboration with the start-up Matroid, tracks the faces of selected high level elected officials on major TV cable news channels: CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the BBC.  Face-o-Matic data is available to the media, researchers, and the public, updated daily here. Stay tuned: we are in the process of testing new faces to add to Face-o-Matic: living past presidents and recent major political party nominees.

PolitiFact announces “2017 Lie of the Year”

Our fact-checking partner PolitiFact has announced its annual Lie of the Year: President Donald Trump’s statement in May 2017 to NBC’s Lester Holt, “This Russia thing…is a made-up story.” Below is the interview on the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive.

Writes PolitiFact editor, Angie Drobnic Holan:

In both classified and public reports, U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered actions to interfere with the election. Those actions included the cyber-theft of private data, the placement of propaganda against particular candidates, and an overall effort to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.

Trump’s statement about Russia was both the PolitiFact’s editors pick for Lie of the Year, and the top one chosen by PolitiFact’s readers in an online poll by “an overwhelming margin.” Readers also called out other fact-checks to highlight for the year, choosing from a list of ten from the editors, or writing in their own nominations.

The top vote-getter after Trump’s statement on Russia was Idaho Republican Rep. Raul Labrador’s claim that “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” “While the exact number of deaths saved by having health insurance is uncertain, the researchers we contacted agreed that the number is higher than zero–probably quite a bit higher,” writes PolitiFact reporter Louis Jacobson, who rated the claim “Pants on Fire.”

In third place was Sean Spicer’s claim, “that was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period,” referring to the presidential inauguration in January 2017. PolitiFact at the time rated that claim “Pants on Fire”: “Spicer suggested 720,000 attended Trump’s inauguration, while organizers said they expected 700,000 to 900,000, and Trump himself estimated 1.5 million. All of those figures are less than the 1.8 million people who attended Obama’s 2009 inaugural.”

To see more video of fact-checks chosen by PolitiFact’s readers and editors as lies or misstatements of the year, see this list, which includes links both to TV news clips of public officals making statements on the air, along with links to fact-checks of those statements.

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