Category Archives: Television Archive

TV news fact-checked: Comey edition

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We devote this week’s edition of the TV News Archive roundup to the controversy that’s erupted surrounding President Donald Trump’s sudden announcement on Tuesday, May 9, that he was firing FBI director James Comey. The TV News Archive provides a wealth of material for exploring media coverage of this major moment in U.S. history.

Comey fame tied to Clinton and Trump

Comey may still not quite be a household name, but mention of “Comey” spiked higher than ever on TV newscasts this week after he was fired. Comey has enjoyed notoriety in the past, his biggest moments tied closely to the fates of 2016 presidential rivals Hillary Clinton and Trump.

The most recent spike before this week was on March 20, when he testified before Congress, confirming that the FBI was investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Another major spike occurred in November 2016, days before the election, when Comey announced the FBI was reopening an investigation into then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for official business while serving as secretary of state. Comey also garnered attention in July 2016, when he announced that the FBI would not be pursuing charges against Clinton.

The visual below, showing mentions of “Comey,” was created with Television Explorer, an online tool fueled by TV News Archive data and created by Kalev Leetaru. This tool can be used to find patterns in words and phrases captured by closed captioning and contained in the TV News Archive.

Source: Television Explorer, Kalev Leetaru

Trump’s letter to Comey fact-checked

In the hours following the firing, one major point of focus for fact-checkers and other media was the portion of the letter to Comey where Trump stated, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”

Below is a CNN broadcast, as captured in the TV News Archive, where the CNN newscaster Dave Briggs reads the letter on the air.

PolitiFact, The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker, and FactCheck.org have all weighed in on the president’s assertion, noting that too much remains unknown to confirm it. “With Comey out, it’s unclear whether the public will ever learn if the FBI was investigating Trump personally, rather than just his associates — or anything else about the investigation, for that matter,” wrote PolitiFact’s Lauren Carroll on May 11. (See fact-checks connected to televised statements by public officials here.)

Meanwhile, the story continues to unfold. On May 11, Sarah Huckabee, deputy White House press secretary, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the president had confirmed this assertion with her directly. And Trump himself told NBC News’ Lester Holt that the assurances came during a private dinner and twice over the phone. And on Friday morning, Trump tweeted that Comey “better hope there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Some Watergate history, please

Many commentators this week have noted parallels between Trump’s firing of Comey and the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when President Richard Nixon ordered independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired, during the Watergate investigation; his boss, Attorney General Elliot Richardson, and Deputy General William Ruckelshaus, both of whom refused to fire Cox, resigned in protest. Acting head of the Department of Justice, Robert Bork, carried out the order to fire Cox. (Note: the Richard Nixon Library playfully, but accurately, fired off a tweet noting that Nixon had never fired an FBI director, and then later was criticized for doing so by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers presidential libraries.)

While the TV News Archive’s collection of 1.3 million TV news shows dates back to 2009, long after the Nixon era, some footage from that time is available from later airings. Here, for example, is footage of Cox’s press conference right before he was dismissed.

And here is a quick explainer of the Saturday Night Massacre, as broadcast by MSNBC in 2013.

Searching Trump Archive for past Trump statements about Comey

The largely hand-curated Trump Archive, a collection of Trump statements and appearances on TV news broadcasts, makes it easier to find past instances of Trump talking about Comey. The TV News Archive is working on ways to make the creation of such collections less labor intensive, by using machine learning tools to identify instances of public officials speaking within the collection of 1.3 million tv news shows.

A search of closed captions on the terms “Trump” and “Comey” would yield both instances when Trump is speaking about Comey and newscasters who are reporting on the two men. But searching within the Trump Archive quickly yields Trump statements about Comey.

Here is some of what we found:

April 28, 2016: Trump says “I think if [Comey’s]  straight up she’s not going to be able to run.”

 

June 13, 2016: Trump talking about FBI investigation of Orlando nightclub shooting, “I’m a big fan of the FBI, there’s no bigger fan than me, but look they’ve seen better days. Let’s face it.”

October 13, 2016:  Trump speaking about Comey, “The great men and women who work for the FBI are embarrassed and ashamed of what he has done to one of our truly great institutions, the FBI itself.”

October 20, 2016: Trump at Al Smith Dinner, joking at an annual fundraiser for Catholic charities:  “I’d like to address an important religious matter, the issue of going to confession. Or, as Hillary calls it, the Fourth of July weekend with FBI director Comey.”

October 29, 2016: Following Director Comey’s letter to congressional leaders about newly discovered Clinton emails, Trump says, “I have to tell you, I respect the fact that Director Comey was able to come back after what he did. I respect that very much.”

November 14, 2016: Trump won’t say if he will ask Comey to resign.  “I think that I would rather not comment on that yet. I don’t– I haven’t made up my mind. I respect him a lot. I respect the FBI a lot.”

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TV news fact-checked: Trump’s first 100 days

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To mark his 100th day in office, President Donald Trump made several public appearances and released a campaign-style political ad. Here are some fact-checked claims from those televised interviews,  speeches, as well as the ad, all viewable and shareable on the TV News Archive.

Fact-checked TV news clips on the TV News Archive. Click, watch, and share: https://archive.org/details/factchecked

Fact-checking Trump’s first 100 days campaign ad

President Donald Trump put his stamp of approval on this ad, which includes several factual claims. Among them: “Fact: 500,000-plus jobs created,” and “America becoming more energy independent,” while the words “Keystone Pipeline” are shown on screen.

“Using just the two months on his watch–February and March–the U.S. economy created 317,000 jobs, not 500,000,” reported Louis Jacobson for PolitiFact.

“Samantha Gross, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Energy Security and Climate Initiative… notes that she doesn’t think approving the pipeline was a bad decision…  ‘We’ve made it easier and efficient to ship that crude down to the states,’ though [sic.] the pipeline, ‘but as far as changing energy independence, I don’t think so,’ she said,” Lori Robertson reported for FactCheck.org.

Claim: first time in modern era a Supreme Court justice confirmed in first 100 days (mostly true)

At the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Georgia on April 28, Trump said, “For the first time in the modern political era, we have confirmed a new justice in the first 100 days. The last time that happened was 136 years ago, in 1881. Now, we won’t get any credit for this, but don’t worry about it.”

This statement was rated “mostly true” by PolitiFact’s Lauren Carroll. “Trump has his history right. He is indeed the first modern president to fill an open Supreme Court seat within the first 100 days.” She went on to report “The reality is that very few presidents are presented with the opportunity to appoint and confirm a new Supreme Court justice within their first 100 days… Trump is the only one of the group who entered office with a vacant Supreme Court seat from the start—meaning he had a full 100 days to nominate and confirm his pick.”

Claim: U.S. has a $17 billion trade deficit with Canada (no, it’s a surplus)

President Trump sat down with FOX’s Martha MacCallum for their “The First 100 Days” interview. In it, Trump said “The trade deficit with Mexico is close to $70 billion, even with Canada it’s $17 billion trade deficit with Canada.”

The reporters at FactCheck.org, though, found that “For the second year in a row, the U.S. had a trade surplus with Canada. In 2016, the U.S. had an $8.1 billion trade surplus in goods and services with Canada, up nearly 33 percent from the $6.1 billion surplus in 2015.”

Claim: Trump has negative media coverage because reporters donated to Clinton (misleading)

The president spoke to a large crowd in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he cited a study by the conservative Media Research Center talking about negative coverage of his administration. He then suggested the reason was “perhaps that’s because, according to the Center for Public Integrity, 96 percent of journalists who made donations in the last election gave them to our opponent.”

FactCheck.org reported that the Center for Public Integrity study showed “that about 430 people ‘who work in journalism’ contributed about $382,000 to the Clinton campaign through August, compared with about 50 journalists who contributed $14,000 to Trump. Notably, however, the study did not find that any journalists responsible for covering the White House, Congress or national politics made political contributions of any kind.”

Claim: people with pre-existing conditions are covered in the House GOP health care bill (unclear)

In an interview for CBS’s Face the Nation, President Trump said, “Pre-existing conditions are in the bill. And I just watched another network than yours, and they were saying, ‘Pre-existing is not covered.’ Pre-existing conditions are in the bill. And I mandate it. I said, ‘Has to be.'”

PolitiFact’s Amy Sherman reviewed and rated this claim “mostly false,” reporting “Overall, the latest proposal seems to weaken existing protections for people with pre-existing conditions, not strengthen them.”

An amendment was proposed since then, and Glenn Kessler summarized the new proposal for the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, writing, “if the bill ever became law, much would depend on unknown policy decisions by individual states–and then how those decisions are implemented.” This proposal had a House vote yesterday, Thursday, and passed.

How to find Trump’s 100th-day TV news appearances

To review the 100 days interviews and speeches yourself and grab the clips you want, check out this Fox interview in two parts, the Harrisburg, PA speech, the NRA address, the Face the Nation interview in two parts, the “CBS This Morning” interview in two parts, and Trump’s weekly address.

Trump’s Harrisburg address, as seen in context in the TV News Archive. Note Trump icon on top left, showing this show is part of the Trump Archive.

To peruse all the fact-checking work our partners have done on statements made on TV and archived in the TV News Archive, take a look at this table of more than 800 fact-checks of Donald Trump, his administration, and some congressional leaders. This collection will continue to grow as we develop the congressional collections, add more administration official statements, and integrate new statements and reporting.

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TV news fact-checked: Ivanka, McCaskill, Mnuchin, Perez, and Mulvaney

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By Katie Dahl

This week’s roundup includes five fact-checks of statements by public officials, preserved on TV News Archive. Our fact-checking partners examined the financial disclosures of the president, who outspent whom in the Georgia election, and whether high ranking Democrats voted for a border wall a decade ago.

Claim: Child care is the largest expense in more than half of American households (mostly false)

Ivanka Trump, first daughter and adviser to President Donald Trump, participated in a panel in Berlin with German President Angela Merkel. While there, she said the “single largest expense in over half of American households is childcare, even exceeding the cost of housing.”

“Child Care Aware, a trade and advocacy group, found that it cost on average over $17,000 a year for infant day care in Massachusetts,” reported Jon Greenberg for PolitiFact. “The question is, does paying for child care top all the other expenses that half of the households have to cover, such as housing and food?…Government data suggests it does not. For most families, the No. 1 cost is housing.” The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, also reported,”[S]he would have been on more solid ground if she had focused on low-income households or families with small children, not all households.”

Claim: Nobody applies to the U.S. for refugee status. They apply to the U.N. (false)

“Nobody applies to the United States for refugee status. They apply to the United Nations,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D., Mo., during a January senate hearing for Rex Tillerson’s nomination as Secretary of State.

PolitiFact Missouri reporter Aleissa Bleyl reported this week that “about 20 percent to 30 percent of resettlement cases are handled by the United States and not the U.N… Overall, most refugees seeking resettlement to the United States must first go through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. However, refugees with nuclear family members already living in the United States are given a different priority that isn’t processed through the United Nations.”

Claim: Trump has given more financial disclosure than anybody else (false)

After receiving a question about whether the president would release his tax returns, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said, “The president has no intention… The president has released plenty of information and, I think, has given more financial disclosure than anybody else. I think the American population has plenty of information.”

Allison Graves and Louis Jacobson rated Mnuchin’s statement as “False,” reporting for PolitiFact, “Trump released a financial disclosure report that all presidential candidates are required to fill out, but the fact that Trump has not released any tax filings undermines Munchin’s claim… the lack of transparency around his tax returns remains a significant omission compared with recent presidents.”

Claim: Ossof was outspent two to one in Georgia race (unsupported)

Neither candidate received enough votes to win outright in the race for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, in a special election to replace Tom Price, who now heads the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  A runoff is now scheduled for June. Explaining the outcome, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said,“By the way, Chris, he was outspent two to one. I mean Paul Ryan’s super PAC was in. They hit the panic button big-time on the Republican side.”

But, “the Federal Election Commission campaign finance records don’t support his claim that Ossoff was ‘outspent two to one.’” According to Eugene Kiely and Robert Farley at FactCheck.org, “Ossoff and the outside groups who supported him spent more than the Republican groups that opposed him.”



Claim: Obama, Schumer, and Clinton voted for a border wall in 2006 (half true)

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney recently defended proposed funding for a border wall between the United States and Mexico. “We still don’t understand why the Democrats are so wholeheartedly against it. They voted for it in 2006. Then-Sen. Obama voted for it. Sen. Schumer voted for it. Sen. Clinton voted for it,” he said.

“They did vote for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized building a fence along about 700 miles of the border between the United States and Mexico,” reported Allison Graves for PolitiFact. “Still, the fence they voted for is not as substantial as the wall Trump is proposing. Trump himself called the 2006 fence a ‘nothing wall.’”

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TV News Lab: Hyperaudio improving TV news video captioning and sharing

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In a new blog series, TV News Lab, we’ll demonstrate how the Internet Archive is partnering with technology, journalism, and academic organizations to experiment with and improve the TV News Archive, our free, public, online library of TV news shows. Here we interview Mark Boas, founder of the Hyperaudio project, an organization that works to make audio and video more accessible and shareable on the web, by providing an easy-to-use interface for copying and pasting bits of transcripts to create mash ups of shareable video. You can find the open source code powering Hyperaudio on GitHub.

Mark Boas talks to the Internet Archive about Hyperaudio.

NW: What is the problem you’re trying to solve by applying Hyperaudio technology to the TV News Archive?

MB: People find TV news credible. It’s very hard to fake TV news. I’d love to see people using TV news to back up any sort of political or other expression a public official is trying to make, by showing the source material and also the arguments about those statements. I think this also has implications for improving media literacy.

(An example mix made at Chattanooga Public Library.)

NW: What stands in the way of people sharing TV news video right now?

MB:  One of the problems is that audio and video on the web has been a black box in a way. It has not been very well integrated into the web because it’s difficult to do that. If you see a big block of text, it’s easy to highlight, copy, paste and send it off. But if you have an interesting piece of audio to share, how do you do that? There are ways to do it, but it’s not intuitive.

Coupled with that is it’s also hard to find audio on the internet. If you’re searching for search terms, you may or may not find what you want, but only if someone has added sufficient metadata so it’s discoverable. Transcripts allow you to search, but also provide a way to share. And the key to that is that you need not just the transcript, but also you need to match the words in the transcript to the proper times in the audio.

NW: Why is it hard to match the transcript to the audio in a video?

The first step is getting a good quality transcript. It’s great that the TV News Archive uses open captions, but it’s not perfect. (Note: the TV News Archive is searchable via closed captioning, but there’s often a several-second lag between the captions and the video, as well as other quality issues.) The transcript usually needs to be cleaned up. The better the transcript, the better the match. Closed captions are done in real time by humans who make mistakes.

The next challenge is to try and minimize the time it takes to match the words in the transcript to the audio. If we want to automate the process, we need to figure out how to do that more quickly. It’s very intensive on the computing side. I’m experimenting with chunking up the video to speed up the process. I think we’ll see that the matching is an exponential task: a one hour transcript might take 30 minutes and a three hour transcript might take more than three times that. But if we split it up into smaller chunks, the processing might become more efficient

How do people try out Hyperaudio?

Hyperaudio is not a commercial software as a service. It’s more of a demo of the underlying technology. We work with groups like the Studs Terkel Radio Archive (WFMT Chicago), to help them make the most of their content and data; whatever we make flows back into our open source code on GitHub. What we do is very experimental, but it will give you an idea what’s possible. If you want to experiment with TV News Archive, you can do that at http://newsarchive.hyperaud.io/. More info on our experiments and collaborations can be found on our blog.

TV news highlights: visitor logs, voter turnout, China, North Korea, United Airlines

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By Katie Dahl

In this week’s look back at TV news highlights that have been fact-checked by our partners, we get a history of the White House policy on releasing visitor logs; a look at how 2016 voter turnout compared to other elections; an examination of whether United Airlines was contractually obliged against removing a ticketed passenger; a comparison of U.S. vs. China on their polluting record; and an analysis of how positively China regards Trump’s recent actions on North Korea.

Claim: In not releasing visitor logs to the public, the White House is following the same policy as every U.S. administration “from the beginning of time” except Obama (true)

Press Secretary Sean Spicer defended the White Houses’s announcement it would not be releasing names of White House visitors to the public, saying, “I think as was noted on Friday, we’re following the same policy that every administration from the beginning of time has used with respect to visitor logs.” Later in that daily press briefing, he refined his statement: “[I]t’s the same policy that every administration had up until the Obama administration.”

Former President Barack Obama’s decision to make visitor logs public was done in the name of transparency–although only after pressure from outside groups, explained Louis Jacobson for PolitiFact. But Spicer is correct that “[h]istorically speaking, the policy under Obama was the exception, rather than the rule.”

Claim: Voter turnout for the 2016 presidential race was the lowest in 20 years (false)

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, D., Vt., talked about his national tour to increase civic participation, citing a statistic on voting turnout: “So many of our people are giving up on the political process. It is very frightening. In the last presidential election, when Trump won, we had the lowest voter turnout over — in 20 years. And in the previous two years before that, in the midterm election, we had the lowest voter turnout in 70 years.”

“In fact, turnout was higher than it was in 2012,” according to Eugene Kiely at FactCheck.org. PolitiFact’s Jacobson confirmed that Sanders was wrong on the claim that 2016 had the “lowest turnout” in the last 20 years, but correct that 2014 saw the lowest turnout in 70 years. Both reporters cited the work of Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida.

Claim: United Airlines passenger had a right to stay on the plane (false)

After United Airlines violently removed paying passenger David Dao from a plane to make room for employees, syndicated columnist Andrew Napolitano said on Fox News: “By dislodging this passenger against his will, United violated its contractual obligation. He paid for the ticket, he bought the ticket, he passed the TSA, he was in his seat, he has every right to stay there.”

“False,” wrote Joshua Gillan forPunditFact, a project of PolitiFact. “Napolitano’s blanket assertion is incorrect. Experts told us that airlines, including United, outline dozens of reasons why they might remove a passenger after he has already boarded.”

Claim: China and India pollute more than the United States (four Pinocchios)

During a recent TV interview, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said, “China and India had no obligations under the [Paris Accord] agreement until 2030.” He also claimed that “[Europe, China, India] are polluting way more than we are.”

“[B]oth countries pledge to reach these goals by 2030, meaning they are taking steps now to meet their commitments,” reported Glenn Kessler for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. “China (but not India) does produce more carbon dioxide than the United States, but it has nearly 1.4 billion people compared to 325 million for the United States. So, on a per capita basis, the United States in 2015 produced more than double the carbon dioxide emissions of China — and eight times more than India.”

Claim: Trump on North Korea: “We’ve never seen such a positive response on our behalf from China” (half true)

Defending his decision to step back from labeling China a currency manipulator, President Donald Trump said he is working with China on a “bigger problem,” North Korea, and that the result is good, claiming, “[N]obody has ever seen such a positive response on our behalf from China.”

PolitiFact’s Jon Greenberg shared results of interviews with several experts as support for his rating of “half true” for the claim: “It is difficult to quantify a ‘positive response.’ Whether the latest moves represent a sea shift that ‘no one has ever seen,’ or the logical conclusion of a longer pattern, probably lies in the eye of the beholder.”

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Find O’Reilly Factor clips on TV News Archive

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With yesterday’s announcement Fox News had ousted Bill O’Reilly from the helm of “The O’Reilly Factor,” following mounting complaints of sexual harassment, the pugilistic host’s reign as the “king of cable news” passes into history.

However, a good portion of that American political history is preserved for posterity as part of the TV News Archive, the Internet Archive’s searchable collection of television news. We’ve got some 3,000 hours of “The O’Reilly Factor” dating back to 2009,  including at least 20 segments that have been fact-checked by PolitiFact.

Perhaps O’Reilly described his mission best with his response to a viewer, who urged him in October 2016, “Stick to the facts, not your personal opinion.” Said O’Reilly: “The O’Reilly factor is built around my personal opinions, sir. Twenty years…thus the name: ‘The O’Reilly Factor.'”

Here are several fact-checked O’Reilly highlights from recent years:

Guns.  O’Reilly claimed that  Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland “voted, so the folks know, in Washington, D.C., to keep guns away from private citizens.” PunditFact: “False….Garland didn’t vote on this case at all.” (March 2016.)

Crime. From 2014 to 2015, said O’Reilly in October 2015, Austin’s “murder rate is up a whopping 83 percent.” PolitiFact Texas: Mostly False. “[I]f O’Reilly had pulled back the camera, so to speak, he could have determined that Austin appears on pace to have a lower murder rate in 2015 than in 2014.”

Iran, China, and Russia. O’Reilly: Russia and China “absolutely said pretty clearly” they would not keep economic sanctions on Iran if the United States “walked away from the deal.” This time O’Reilly earned a “Mostly True,” from PolitiFact: “O’Reilly is pushing the envelope when he said “absolutely” clear, as they haven’t issued formal statements. But all of their actions indicate that what O’Reilly said is substantially accurate.”

Muslims cheering 9-11. “Thousands of Muslims, regular folks, celebrated in the streets… . these people are a minority but they were not called out in any official way by Muslim nations around the world.” PolitiFact: “Half True.” “So far as we can tell, there was no official condemnation of people celebrating the 9/11 attacks. However, Muslim governments, and religious leaders, condemned the attacks themselves, as did many average Muslims.”

There’s more! Popcorn fact-check annotation experiment

For a reel of fact-checks of O’Reilly statements over the years, check out this compilation created with a recent version of Mozilla’s Popcorn editor by TV News Archive Director Roger Macdonald.

Popcorn allows viewers to feed TV News Archive video into an editor and mix it up with other videos, add text annotations, hyperlinks, and more. We believe this is a glimpse of the future: giving people the tools to put the messages that bombard them in context, rather than being passive viewers.

Mozilla launched the innovative tool in 2012; while they no longer support it, the source code is open for others to improve. Please be patient with occasional buffering glitches.  Try clicking on some of the text for links and the orange quote icon link to citations.  And, if you want to go wild, click the arrows triangle icon and try your hand at remixing.

If impatient with problems playing the Popcorn version, here is a plain-old mp4.  No embedded links or remix options.

From Spicer to wiretapping to Sweden: does TV news fuel political rhetoric?

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Cross posted from MediaShift.

A few hours after after Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, compared Syrian President Bashar Assad to Adolf Hitler, saying, “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II…You had … someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” the media speculation began. Where did Spicer get the idea to compare Assad to Hitler?

On Twitter, a liberal blogger named Yashar Ali pointed to a Fox News segment that had aired on April 10, featuring a Skype interview with Kassim Eid, a Syrian activist who has written about surviving an earlier gas attack, seen below on the TV News Archive. Eid said, “He displaced half of the country. He destroyed the country. He gassed women and children. Who can be worse than him? He’s worse than Hitler.”

Ali’s tweet was picked up later that afternoon by NJ.com in a report about the social media criticism following Spicer’s statement. At 4:50 p.m., Charlie Warzel, a reporter for BuzzFeed, posted a piece hypothesizing that the Fox Business News interview might have been the inspiration for Spicer’s statement.

Of course only Spicer himself knows if the Fox News report inspired his statement, which he eventually apologized for after several hours of harsh criticism. After all, he is certainly not the first public official to run into trouble when making statements about Hitler.
In an era where news no longer solely arrives on newsprint on front doorsteps, tracing the provenance of a statement, idea, story, or report across media platforms–social media, television, news websites–has become a common pursuit. This has been, perhaps, fueled by the president, who has made such references himself.

As a library, the Internet Archive can help. Our Wayback Machine preserves websites online, with more than 286 million websites saved overtime. And our TV News Archive provides an online, public library with 1.3 million shows and counting. Here we have the original source for many types of statements by public officials: news conferences, appearances before congressional committees, appearances on TV news shows, and more. The 60-second segment format allows for editing your own clips up to three minutes long and makes them shareable on social media and embeddable on websites.

For example, in February, Trump made a reference at a Florida rally about Sweden: “Look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.” Fact- checkers reported that nothing had happened in Sweden the night before.

Trump later tweeted, however, that his statement about Swedish problems was inspired by Fox News report.

In that report, Fox showed an interview by a Swedish film maker, Ami Horowitz, who asserts that refugees are responsible for “an absolute surge in both gun violence and rape in Sweden once they began this open door policy.”

Robert Farley, a reporter for FactCheck.org, wrote that this claim is contested by “Swedish authorities and criminologists.”

Several weeks later, Trump credited a “talented legal mind” on Fox news as the source for his March 2017 tweet accusing former President Barack Obama ordering wiretapping of Trump tower during the presidential election.

Following Trump’s statement, Shepard Smith, chief news anchor for Fox News, said that “Fox News cannot confirm Judge Napalitano’s commentary. Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the president of the united states was surveilled at any time in any way, full stop.”

The question of how political rhetoric travels across media platforms goes far beyond the Trump administration. Media researchers are developing methodologies to track messages and stories as they travel across the news ecosphere. Understanding these phenomenon is essential in figuring out effective ways to improve overall media literacy and fight the spread of misinformation.

As an early experiment in making such research easier, we’ve been developing hand-curated collections of statements by public officials, starting with the Trump Archive and now branching out to creating archives (still in development) for the congressional leadership on both sides of the party aisle: Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky.; Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D., N.Y.; House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif.

We’re working now to develop partnerships to use machine learning approaches, such as speaker identification and natural language processing, to make our resources more useful for researchers. Ultimately, we’ll improve search to make it simpler to search across our different collections and types of media.

TV News highlights: Hitler, Syria, NATO, and more

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By Katie Dahl

This week our round up of fact-checks of TV appearances by public officials includes: White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s claim that Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people; how President Donald Trump’s strategy on Syrian airstrikes varies from former President Barack Obama’s; the increased use by the U.S. Senate of the filibuster; whether NATO has been fighting terrorism; and the state of Social Security disability insurance.

Claim: Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons on his own people (pants on fire)

In a White House press briefing on Tuesday, April 11, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer defended the U.S. airstrikes on Syria, saying, “someone as despicable as Hitler, who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.” Later in the same briefing, a reporter asked him to clarify his comment. He said, “I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no … he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing. I mean, there was clearly … there was not — in the — he brought them into the Holocaust center, I understand that.”

For PolitiFact, Jon Greenberg labeled the statement “pants on fire.” He reported that Hitler did use chemical weapons during World War II, “they pumped hydrogen cyanide gas into the killing rooms packed with Jews, Roma, and others singled out for extermination by Nazi leaders. At concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen, Jews were taken from cattle cars and forced into ‘showers,’ where guards released the gas.” Greenberg went on to write, “Spicer appears to be trying to limit his definition of chemical weapons to those dropped from planes or fired through cannons, as Assad has been alleged to have done. That sells short the definition in the Chemical Weapons Convention…” He also noted: “… Spicer’s qualification that Hitler didn’t use them on his “own people,” overlooks that German Jews were full citizens until they had their rights stripped away by Hitler’s totalitarian regime.”

At FactCheck.org, Robert Farley and Lori Robertson reported that the Nazis stockpiled chemical weapons: “[W]hile Hitler never employed them in battle, historians say that was largely for tactical reasons.” Farley and Robertson also detailed how Spicer’s comment inspired a series of online fake news reports, including several manufactured Spicer quotes.

Since the briefing, Spicer has apologized on CNN, Fox, and twice on MSNBC.

Claim:  Obama’s proposed Syrian airstrike was different from Trump’s actual airstrike (false)

Asked by a reporter how the Syrian airstrike was different than the one former President Barack Obama proposed in 2013 after a chemical attack, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., said,“Secretary Kerry… said it would sort of be like a pinprick… this was a strike that was well-planned, well-executed, went right to the heart of the matter, which is using chemical weapons.” Sen. Marco Rubio, R., Fla., made a similar claim, saying Obama “had no clear objective.”

Robert Farley reported “what Obama proposed to Congress back in 2013 was very similar in scope to the attack on Syria undertaken by Trump. In a televised address, Obama called for ‘a targeted strike to achieve a clear objective: deterring the use of chemical weapons and degrading Assad’s capabilities.’”

Lauren Carroll reported for PolitiFact that there are plenty of similarities: “Both [Barack and Trump] describe sending a message to Assad that chemical weapons use is unacceptable. Both involve a targeted attack plan designed to degrade Assad’s chemical weapon capabilities by taking out related facilities and resources.”

Claim: there were more filibusters for Obama nominees than in all U.S. history (half true)

Asked about Democrats’ role in increasing use of filibusters, Sen. Ben Cardin, D., Md., said “We’ve seen more filibusters on judicial nominees by the Republicans under President Obama than we saw in the whole history of the United States Senate. Both sides have blame here.”

Allison Graves reported for PolitiFact: “[M]easuring filibusters is troublesome, experts say, because it has an overly broad meaning. Senators tend to consider any type of obstruction to scheduling a nomination or measure as a filibuster, said Steven Smith, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.” According to the Congressional Research Service, Graves concluded “Cardin is off.” But Graves also wrote that Cardin has a point: “Less than one nominee per year was subject to a cloture filing in the 40 years before Obama took office. From 2009-13, the number of nominees subject to a cloture filing jumped to over seven per year.”

Claim: NATO didn’t fight terrorism, now it does (factually incorrect)

At a press conference on April 12 with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Trump said,”The secretary general and I had a productive conversation about what more NATO can do in the fight against terrorism. I complained about that a long time ago, and they made a change. Now they do fight terrorism. I said it was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete.”

Michelle Ye Hee Lee reported that “NATO has been involved in counterterrorism since 1980, and especially since 9/11.”

Lauren Carroll wrote for PolitiFact that “the premise leading to Trump’s change of heart — the idea that he prompted NATO to start fighting terrorism — is false.” She described NATO’s involvement in fighting terrorism this way, “NATO has been actively dealing with terrorism since the 1980s. And since 9/11, it has played a significant role in the War on Terror, including deploying troops in Afghanistan for more than a decade.”

Claim: Social Security disability insurance grew under Obama, is wasteful (three Pinocchios)

Asked whether the president was “revising his thinking” on Medicare and Social Security, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said, “Let me ask you a question: Do you really think that Social Security disability insurance is part of what people think of when they think of Social Security? I don’t think so. It’s the fastest growing program. It grew tremendously under President Obama. It’s a very wasteful program and we want to try and fix that.”

For The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Lee reported that pointing to the growth in Social Security disability insurance under Obama is “misleading.” She noted, “The program did grow since 1996, but a lot of that had to do with the shifting demographics of Americans who rely on the program.” She also reported that it’s a “stretch” to call the program wasteful: “overpayments represented less than 1 percent of total disability outlays [from 2011 to 2015].”

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TV News highlights: stimulus package, global food demand, carbon emissions, and more

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By Katie Dahl

In this week’s TV News highlight reel, fact-checkers looked into claims about construction projects resulting from former President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, global food demand, carbon emissions, a state law that may seem counter to federal law on health care protections, and how the unemployment rate is actually calculated.

Claim: Nothing was built as a result of the stimulus package (mostly false)

In a town hall for CEOs at the White House, President Donald Trump made these comments about former President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package. “You know, there was a very large infrastructure bill that was approved during the Obama administration, a trillion dollars. Nobody ever saw anything being built. I mean, to this day, I haven’t heard of anything that’s been built. They used most of that money—it went and they used it on social programs and we want this to be on infrastructure.”

FactCheck.org’s Robert Farley reported that “Trump distorted the facts about President Obama’s stimulus package,” of which infrastructure projects was just one part: “[T]he overriding goal…which Trump praised at the time—was to jump-start the economy through a combination of tax cuts to spur spending, federal contracts and grants to create private-sector jobs, and federal aid to local and state governments to ease the effects of the Great Recession.”

Jon Greenberg and Louis Jacobson wrote for PolitiFact, “the idea that nothing was built is wrong. Among many other projects, the Recovery Act helped push to completion the $1 billion DFW Connector highway in Dallas-Fort Worth; a $650 million elevated truck route to the Port of Tampa; a new Cleveland Interbelt Bridge; a tunnel connecting Oakland and Contra Costa County, Calif.; a veterans’ facility at Fort Bliss in Texas; and new headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard.”

Claim: Global food demand is expected to increase by 50-90 percent by 2050 (mostly true)

On March 21, National Agriculture Day, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said that exports from “farm production have been declining due to unwise trade policies.” He juxtaposed that with a prediction, “Global food demand is expected to increase by 50 to 97 percent by 2050.”

Gabrielle Healy reported for PolitiFact, “Both the data the White House showed us and research we found supports the claim that food demand will increase in the coming decades. Yet estimates vary surrounding the level to which it will increase.” A study in the journal Agricultural Economics, as reported by Healy, “stated food demand might increase by 59 percent to 98 percent between 2005 and 2050.” She reported on another study connected with National Academy of Sciences, which said “crop demand might rise by 100 to 110 percent between 2005 and 2050.”

Claim: Fracking helped reduce carbon emissions (yes, and)

On a Sunday program on Fox NEWS, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt said about carbon emissions, “we are pre-1994 levels, and do you know why? Largely because of innovation and technology, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, because there’s been a conversion to natural gas in the generation of electricity.”

Michelle Ye Hee Lee from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker confirmed Pruitt’s claim about overall emissions levels being at pre-1994 levels, but pointed out these are not only due to greater reliance on natural gas and fracking: “The [Energy Information Administration] attributes reduction in coal emissions to the switch from coal-powered plants to more efficient natural-gas-powered plants, and the growth in renewable energy (especially wind and solar).”

Claim: In NY you can’t be charged more for health care because of your age (true)

On CNN, discussing a key element of the failed American Health Care Act plan, Rep. Chris Collins, R., N.Y., asserted, “In New York under our state insurance commissioner, we have what we call a one to one. You cannot charge an older person even one dollar more than a younger person.”

Dan Clark reported for PoltiFact, “New York state has had what’s called a ‘community rating’ model of health insurance since 1993. It requires health insurance companies to charge the same price for coverage in select regions regardless of age, gender, occupation or health status.”

Clark also examined whether federal law could override this state law. According to Rachel Morgan of the National Conference of State Legislatures, “Federal law preempts state law, but sometimes it creates a floor instead of a ceiling for actions that can be taken by the states…” Clark concluded, “The floor, in this case, is the federal cap on age-based health care premiums. New York state’s law stands because its added restriction does not change federal law but supplements it.”

Claim: When you give up looking for a job, you’re statistically considered employed (false)

Again speaking at the town hall for CEOs, President Trump said, “When you look for a job, you can’t find it and you give up, you are now considered statistically employed. But I don’t consider those people employed.”

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler explained, “In the most common unemployment rate, known as the U-3, you are considered unemployed only if you are actively looking for a job.” But goes on to report, “You are not considered ‘statistically employed’” if you have given up looking, but still want to be working. “[Y]ou are considered not in the labor force.”

Greenberg and Jacobson added, “There is an official statistical category for people who want and look for a job but then give up: They are called ‘discouraged workers.’ Specifically, these people ‘want and are available for a job and who have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months’ but are ‘not currently looking because they believe there are no jobs available or there are none for which they would qualify.’” This subset of people who want jobs and have stopped looking make up “only about one-half of 1 percent of the ‘out of work’ Americans Trump seems to have been referring to.”

Internet Archive to help First Draft News debunk fake news

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We are delighted to announce a new partnership with First Draft News, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to ferreting out misinformation online.

In its short existence–it was founded in June 2015–First Draft News has already spearheaded innovative projects that bring together news organizations, social technology companies, and human rights organizations to verify the information that flows to online audiences. First Draft also helps define the problem: in February, Claire Wardle, the group’s research director, published a helpful taxonomy of the different types of fake news and misinformation that proliferate online.

Example: with French elections fast approaching on April 23, 2017, First Draft News launched CrossCheck, a project combining the efforts of more than 37 newsroom partners, as well as journalism students across France and beyond. They’ve been working together to debunk false rumors and news reports in a much-watched contest pitting the far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen against centrist Emmanuel Macron, defender of the European Union, as well as other candidates.

This partnership has quashed reports that 30 percent of Macron’s campaign funding comes from Saudi Arabia, that France is spending 100 million euros to buy hotels to house immigrants, and that the country is planning to replace Christian public holidays with Muslim and Jewish holidays, plus many more. These false stories had been shared thousands of times on social media.

When the elections are over, First Draft News will research whether CrossCheck’s efforts were effective, or how they may be modified to become more so. “CrossCheck is a living laboratory,” says Aimee Rinehart, manager of First Draft’s Partner Network. Wardle will lead the efforts to determine whether the CrossCheck model, where several news organizations sign off on a fact-check or verification, builds public trust in the media, an increasing problem worldwide.

Already, First Draft News partners rely heavily on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to verify information online. With our new collaboration, we hope to increase use of other Internet Archive resources, including our searchable collection of TV news and curated archives such as the Trump Archive, with its linked fact-checks by national fact checking organizations. We also hope the collaboration provides valuable input for our plans to apply more tools of machine learning to the TV News Archive that could help inform reliable news reporting in the future.