Tag Archives: fact check

Expanding the Television Archive

When we started archiving television in 2000, people shrugged and asked, “Why?  Isn’t it all junk anyway?” As the saying goes, one person’s junk is another person’s gold. From 2010-18, scholars, pundits and above all, reporters, have spun journalistic gold from the data captured in our 1.5 million hours of television news recordings. Our work has been fueled by visionary funders(1) who saw the potential impact of turning television – from news reports to political ads – into data that can be analyzed at scale. Now the Internet Archive is taking its Television Archive in new directions. In 2018 our goals for television will be: better curation in what we collect; broader collection across the globe; and working with computer scientists interested in exploring our huge data sets. Simply put, our mission is to build and preserve comprehensive collections of the world’s most important television programming and make them as accessible as possible to researchers and the general public. We will need your help.  

“Preserving TV news is critical, and at the Internet Archive we’ve decided to rededicate ourselves to growing our collection,” explained Roger MacDonald, Director of Television at the Internet Archive. “We plan to go wide, expanding our archives of global TV news from every continent. We also plan to go deep, gathering content from local markets around the country. And we plan to do so in a sustainable way that ensures that this TV will be available to generations to come.”

Libraries, museums and memory institutions have long played a critical role in preserving the cultural output of our creators. Television falls within that mandate. Indeed some of the most comprehensive US television collections are held by the Library of Congress, Vanderbilt University and UCLA. Now we’d like to engage with a broad range of libraries and memory institutions in the television collecting and curation process. If your organization has a mandate to collect television or researcher demand for this media, we would like to understand your needs and interests. The Internet Archive will undertake collection trials with interested institutions, with the eventual goal of making this work self-sustaining.

Simultaneously, we are looking to engage researchers interested in the non-consumptive analysis of television at scale, in ways that continue to respect the interests of right holders. The tools we’ve created may be useful. For instance, we hope the tools the Internet Archive used to detect TV campaign ads can be applied by researchers in new and different ways.  If your organization has interest in computing with television as data at large, we are interested in working with you.

This groundbreaking interface for searching television news, based on the closed captions associated with US broadcasts, was developed between 2009-2012.

A brief history of the Internet Archive’s Television collection:

2000 Working with pioneering engineer, Rod Hewitt, IA begins archiving 20 channels originating from many nations.

Oct. 2001 September 11, 2001 Collection established, and enhanced in 2011.

2009-2012 With funding from the Knight Foundation and many others, we built a service to allow public searching, citation and borrowing of US television news programs on DVD.

2012-2014 Public TV news library launched with tools to search, quote and share streamed snippets from television news.

2014 Pilot launched to detect political advertisements broadcast in the Philadelphia region, led to developing open sourced audio fingerprinting techniques.

2016 Political ad detection, curation, and access expanded to 28 battleground regions for 2016 elections, enabling journalists to fact check the ads and analyze the data at scale. The same tools helped reporters analyze presidential debates.  This resulted in front-page data visualizations in The New York Times, as well as 150+ analyses by news outlets from Fox News to The Economist to FiveThirtyEight.

2017-date Experiments with artificial intelligence techniques to employ facial identification, and on-screen optical character recognition to aid searching and data mining of television. Special curated collections of top political leaders and fact-check integrations.

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential elections, journalists at the NYT and elsewhere began analyzing television as data, in this case looking at the different sound bites each network chose to replay.

Embarking on a new direction also means shifting away from some of our current services. Our dedicated television team has been focusing on metadata enhancement and assisting journalists and scholars to use our data. We will be wrapping up some of these free services in the next three to four months.  We hope others will take up where we left off and build the tools that will make our collection even more valuable to the public.

Now more than ever in this era of disinformation, our world needs an open, reliable, canonical reference source of television news. This cannot exist without the diligent efforts of technologists, journalists, researchers, and television companies all working together to create a television archive open for all. We hope you will join us!

To learn more about the work of the TV News Archive outreach and metadata innovation team over the last few years, please see our blog posts.

(1) Funding for the Television Archive has come from diverse donors, including the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, Rita Allen Foundation, craigslist Charitable Fund and The Buck Foundation.

TV News Record: Charlottesville edition

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

It was an extraordinary week on TV news. Cable news hosts and guests are known for brawling, and there was plenty of that, but this week there were also tears, revulsion, and outright astonishment in response to President Donald Trump’s declaration at a press conference on August 15 that there were “very fine people on both sides” at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. We’ve preserved it all at the TV News Archive, and here present some highlights–or some might say lowlights–in public discourse.

Vice captured white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us”

When white supremacists carrying tiki torches marched at the University of Virginia on the evening of August 11 to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, Vice news was there recording their chants of “blood and soil,” “Jews will not replace us,” and “Whose streets, our streets.” CNN later aired this clip from the Vice video that shows the marchers chanting and counter protesters confronting them and yelling, “No Nazis, no KKK, no fascist USA.”

Trump responded by blaming “many sides” for the violence in Charlottesville

The protest turned deadly on Saturday, August 14, when a car rammed into a crowd of counter-protesters leaving dozens wounded and a 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, dead. Trump came under criticism for making a public statement, saying: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”

On Monday, Trump denounced the KKK and neo-Nazis

After a barrage of criticism, on Monday, Trump made a statement denouncing white supremacists by name: “Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

On Tuesday, Trump was back to finding fault with “both sides”

On August 15, at a press conference in New York City on infrastructure policy, Trump lashed out at reporters asking about Charlottesville during the question and answer period and stated, “I think there’s blame on both sides… you had some bad people in that group, but you also had people who were very fine people on both sides.”



How top-rated cable TV news shows reported on Charlottesville

Source: TV News Archive; content hand-coded by coverage subject

As the Charlottesville controversy unfolded on Monday and Tuesday, the Nielsen top-rated shows on TV cable news revealed a sharp contrast in the editorial decisions made in covering it.

On Monday evening, MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” spent around 79 percent of the show on Charlottesville and its aftermath. Sixteen percent of the show was spent on ongoing investigations of Trump and his campaign and five percent on presidential pardons. Maddow’s guests included Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide Carol Anderson. Maddow began her show with a monologue detailing a history of criminal activity to financially support the neo-Nazi agenda, including a new civil war.

The same night, Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” devoted about one-third of the show’s time to Charlottesville; 14 percent on the Democratic National Committee email hack; 27 percent on a memo by a former Google employee about gender; 11 percent on U.S. “no-go” zones of Sharia law; 14 percent on North Korea, and three percent on a Georgia congressional race. His guests included former NYPD officer Dan Bongino, White House aide Omarosa Newman, former NSA technical director Bill Binney, fired Google employee James Damore, Breitbart London editor-in-chief Nigel Farage, and author and political commentator Charles Krauthammer.

On both Monday and Tuesday, Anderson Cooper devoted 100 percent of coverage to Charlottesville during the first hour of his show, “Anderson Cooper 360.” His guests on Monday included Susan Bro, the mother of slain counter protester, Heather Heyer; Harvard University’s Cornel West; former director of black outreach for George W. Bush, Paris Dennard; The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman; news commentator and author Van Jones; Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis; former Republican National Committee chief of staff Mike Shields; and photographer Ryan Kelly, who snapped the photograph of James Fields, Jr., plowing his car through a crowd of counter protesters.

Several Fox hosts and guests expressed emotion about Trump’s statements

While much of the Fox News coverage put a positive spin on Trump’s statements, what stuck out were the exceptions to that general rule on the conservative cable news channel.

Fox News host Kat Timpf, on air Tuesday when Trump gave his press conference, reacted by saying, “It shouldn’t be some kind of bold statement to say a gathering of white supremacists doesn’t have good people in it. Those are all bad people, period. The fact that’s controversial… I have too much eye makeup on now to start crying right now. It’s disgusting.”

Here is GOP strategist Gianno Caldwell, fighting tears on “Fox and Friends,” as he says, “I come today with a a very heavy heart… last night I couldn’t sleep at all, because President Trump, our president, has literally betrayed the conscience of our country… good people don’t pal around with Nazis and white supremacists.”



Fact-check: Trump’s Tuesday press conference (provides context and timeline)

FactCheck.org’s Eugene Kiely and Robert Farley quickly published a post after Trump’s Tuesday press conference putting several of his assertions in context and providing a timeline of events. For example, they noted that while Trump had said, “before I make a statement, I like to know the facts,” that “Trump hasn’t always waited for ‘the facts’ after a tragedy. For example, he speculated that ‘yet another terrorist attack’ was to blame for an EgyptAir plane that disappeared May 19, 2016. The cause is still unknown.”



Fact-check: Counter-protestors lacked a permit (four Pinocchios)

At his Tuesday press conference, Trump said, “You had a lot of people in that [white nationalist] group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know — I don’t know if you know — they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit.”

“[T]hey did have permits for rallies on Saturday — and they did not need one to go into or gather near Emancipation Park, where white nationalists scheduled their rally. No permits were needed to march on the U-Va. campus on Friday night,” wrote Glenn Kessler for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. He gave the president’s claim “four Pinocchios.”

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McConnell, Schumer, Ryan, Pelosi fact-checked clips featured in new TV News Archive collections

Today the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive unveils growing TV news collections focused on congressional leadership and top Trump administration officials, expanding our experimental Trump Archive to other newsworthy government officials. Together, all of the collections include links to more than 1,200 fact-checked clips–and counting–by our national fact-checking partners, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker.

These experimental video clip collections, which contain more than 3,500 hours of video, include archives focused on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky.; Sen. Minority Leader Charles (“Chuck”) Schumer, D., N.Y.; House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis.; and House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., as well as top Trump officials past and present such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Download a csv of fact-checked video statements or see all the fact-checked clips.

Visit the U.S. Congress archive.

Visit the Executive Branch archive.

Visit the Trump Archive.

We created these largely hand-curated collections as part of our experimentation in demonstrating how Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms could be harnessed to create useful, ethical, public resources for journalists and researchers in the months and years ahead. Other experiments include:

  • the Political TV Ad Archive, which tracked airings of political ads in the 2016 elections by using the Duplitron, an open source audio fingerprinting tool;
  • the Trump Archive, launched in January;
  • Face-O-Matic, an experimental Slack app created in partnership with Matroid that uses facial detection to find congressional leaders’ faces on TV news. Face-O-Matic has quickly proved its mettle by helping our researchers find clips suitable for inclusion in the U.S. Congress Archive; future plans include making data available in CSV and JSON formats.
  • in the works: TV Architect Tracey Jaquith is experimenting with detection of text in the chyrons that run on the bottom third of cable TV news channels. Stay tuned.

Red check mark shows there’s a fact-check in this footage featuring House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif. Follow the link below the clip to see the fact-check, in this case by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.

At present, our vast collection of TV news –1.4 million shows collected since 2009–is searchable via closed-captioning. But closed captions, while helpful, can’t help a user find clips of a particular person speaking; instead, when searching a name such as “Charles Schumer” it returns a mix of news stories about the congressman, as well as clips where he speaks at news conferences, on the Senate floor, or in other venues.

We are working towards a future in which AI enrichment of video metadata will more precisely identify for fact-checkers and researchers when a public official is actually speaking, or some other televised record of that official making an assertion of fact. This could include, for example, camera footage of tweets.

Such clips become a part of the historical record, with online links that don’t rot, a central part of the Internet Archive’s mission to preserve knowledge. And they can help fact-checkers decide where to concentrate their efforts, by finding on-the-record assertions of fact by public officials. Finally, these collections could prove useful for teachers, documentary makers, or anybody interested in exploring on-the-record statements by public officials.

For example, here are two dueling views of the minimum wage, brought to the public by McConnell and Schumer.

In this interview on Fox News in January 2014, McConnell says, “The minimum wage is mostly an entry-level wage for young people.” PolitiFact’s Steve Contorno rated this claim as “mostly true.” While government statistics do show that half of the people making the minimum wage are young, 20 percent are in their late 20s or early 30s and another 30 percent are 35 or older. Contorno also points out that it’s a stretch to call these jobs “entry-level,” but rather are “in the food or retail businesses or similar industries with little hope for career advancement.”

Schumer presents a different assertion on the minimum wage, saying on “Morning Joe” in May 2014 that with a rate of $10.10/hour “you get out of poverty.” PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson rated this claim as “half true”: “Since the households helped by the $10.10 wage account for 46 percent of all impoverished households, Schumer is right slightly less than half the time.”

These new collections reflect the hard work of many at the Internet Archive, including Robin Chin, Katie Dahl, Tracey Jaquith, Roger MacDonald, Dan Schultz, and Nancy Watzman.

As we move forward, we would love to hear from you. Contact us with questions, ideas, and concerns at tvnews@archive.org. And to keep up-to-date with our experiments, sign up for our weekly TV News Archive newsletter.

 

TV News Record: adventures with Face-O-Matic

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

This week we bring you adventures with Face-O-Matic; fact-checks on President Donald Trump’s legislative record and on health care reform; and we follow the TV on use of the term “lies” and “lying.”

Here’s a face, there’s a face, everywhere a face…

Face-O-Matic, our new experimental Slack app that finds faces of political leaders on major national cable networks, has given us a whole new perspective on how imagery is used in news production. Sure, Face-O-Matic picks up clips of President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., and others speaking, whether on the floor, at press conferences, or at a luncheon.

However, often these elected officials’ faces are used to illustrate a point a news anchor is making, or in footage without audio, sometimes as a floating head somewhere on the screen, or as part of a tweet. Face-O-Matic even picks up faces in a crowd.

Face-O-Matic can help find frequently re-aired clips.

Face-O-Matic can find even images that are only briefly displayed on the screen.

Face-O-Matic finds both still and video of Trump in a single clip.

Please take Face-O-Matic on a spin and share your feedback with us, tvnews@archive.org. This blog post explains how it fits into our overall plan to turn TV news into data. To install,  for now you’ll need to ask your Slack team administrator or owner to set it up. The administrator can click on the button below to get started. Visit Slack to learn how to set up or join a Slack team. Questions? Contact Dan Schultz, dan.schultz@archive.org.

Fact-check: Trump has signed more bills than any president ever (wrong)

News cameras captured Trump saying, “We’ve signed more bills — and I’m talking about through the legislature — than any president ever.” (A moment later, he commented that he doesn’t “like Pinocchios,” referring to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker rating system.)

Glenn Kessler, reporting for that same fact-checking site, explained why Trump is not, in fact, besting his predecessors in the White House when it comes to bill signing. But, he refrains from stating how many Pinocchios the president had earned: “Tempted as we are to give the president Pinocchios for his statement, he seemed to be speaking off the cuff and was operating on outdated information from his first 100 days. We don’t play gotcha here at The Fact Checker, and we appreciate that he added a caveat. He certainly appeared to pause for a moment and wonder if he was right. For Trump, that’s a step in the right direction…But he’s way off the mark and actually falling behind in legislative output.”



Fact-check: “bushel” of Pence claims on health care reform (range from “twists the facts” to “false”)

Also writing for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Michelle Ye Hee Lee checked a number of statements Vice President Mike Pence made about the Senate health care reform bill during an appearance at the National Governors Association.

These included, for example, the claim, “I know Governor Kasich isn’t with us, but I suspect that he’s very troubled to know that in Ohio alone, nearly 60,000 disabled citizens are stuck on waiting lists, leaving them without the care they need for months or even years.”

Lee wrote that this claim is false: “[T]here’s no evidence the wait lists are tied to Medicaid expansion. We previously gave four Pinocchios to a similar claim….The expansion and wait list populations are separate, and expansion doesn’t necessarily affect the wait list population….Whether people move off the wait list depends on many factors, such as how urgent their needs are, how long they’ll need services and whether the states have money to pay for them. Many times, a slot opens up only if someone receiving services moves out of the state or dies.”



Follow the TV

There’s been much controversy in news gathering circles about when, whether, and how to invoke the word “lie” when reporting on public officials. One of our archivists, Robin Chin, has noticed a number of prominent uses of the term by commentators in recent TV news coverage.

For example, here’s Shepard Smith on Fox News on July 14 saying, “Jared Kushner filled out his form. I think it’s an F-86 saying who he met with and what he had done… He went back and added 100 names and places. None of these people made it… Why is it lie after lie after lie? … My grandmother used to say when first we practice to — oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. The deception, Chris, is mind boggling.”

And here’s Tom Brokaw on July 16 on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” saying: “Certainly there are atmospherics here that call to mind Watergate, the kind of denial of the obvious and the petty lying that is going on. But at the same time, Watergate, I like to think, was there by itself and this president is entangling himself in that kind of discussion they we’re having here today when it’s not in the interest of anyone, most of all this country, when we have so many issues before us. It’s got to get cleaned up.

On July 17, on “CNN: Tonight With Don Lemon,” here is David Gergen saying: “Other presidents succeed at this by just being straightforward about the facts. And it’s gone on for so long and so duplicitous and so much double speak that you begin to wonder, this is quite intentional. This may be quite intentional. You create a fog bank of lies and uncertainties and vagueness and create so many different details that people just sort of say, the hell with that, I don’t want to watch this… My sense is that a lot of Americans are starting to tune out…”

Search captions for terms you are interested in at the TV News Archive. For trends, try the Television Explorer, built by data scientist Kalev Leetaru, and powered by TV News Archive data, which can provide quick visualizations of terms broken down by network.

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TV News Record: Donald Trump Jr makes “email” popular on TV again

This week the term “email” took on a new meaning in the annals of political controversy, President Donald Trump traveled to Poland, and the Senate continued to struggle with health care reform.

Email back on TV following Trump Jr.’s release of email exchange

Email as a technology may be on the way out (or just evolving), but its place in political history, already assured, got an even bigger boost this week when Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday released a June 2016 email chain in which he exclaimed “I love it” to the prospect of receiving damaging information about Hillary Clinton through Russian intermediaries.

The term “email” is spiking again on TV news broadcasts, though it has not yet climbed to levels in the lead up to the November 2016 elections. In those months, particularly Fox news networks hammered on storylines of both hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to do official business while serving as secretary of state.

However, with congressional and federal investigations of possible Russian tampering with the elections underway, we are early in the life cycle of this story. Stay tuned, and remember that searching terms on TV news is just a few clicks away on Television Explorer, which is fueled by TV News Archive data.

Search of term “emails” on Television Explorer, fueled by TV News Archive data. (Click on image to see larger.)



Following the TV 

The Watergate movie “All the President’s Men,” made the term “follow the money” an inspiration for journalists everywhere; thanks to the TV News Archive, enterprising reporters and researchers can “follow the TV” – find and link to past statements of public officials relevant to a current story.

With this week’s news putting Russia’s involvement in the election back in the headlines, past statements by members of the Trump camp become interesting watching. For example, here’s former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in July 2016, saying “that’s absurd” to the allegation of a Putin-Trump connection.  Here’s Donald Trump Jr. in July 2016 saying it was “disgusting” to say the DNC email hack was perpetrated by the Russian government to support Trump. And here is advisor Kellyanne Conway in December 2016 saying “absolutely not” to a question about whether the Trump campaign was in contact with Russians trying to influence the election.



Factcheck: Obama knew about Russian interference in election and did nothing about it (mostly false)

At a joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda last week, President Trump said “Barack Obama when he was president found out about this, in terms of if it were Russia, found out about it in August. Now the election was in November. That is a lot of time he did nothing about it.”

According to Lauren Carroll reporting for Politifact, the Obama administration took several steps after learning of the interference. Among them: “Obama personally confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin and told him to back off… On Oct. 7, the Obama administration publicly identified Russia for the first time as being behind election-related hacks, issuing a joint statement from Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence… Also, throughout August and up through the election, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson encouraged state-level election officials, through official statements and phone calls, to protect voting-related systems from cyber intrusions…However, the Obama administration took its most significant actions against Russia after Nov. 8. In late December, Obama ordered 35 Russian diplomats and suspected intelligence agents to leave the United States, and he also imposed narrow sanctions on some Russian individuals and organizations.”



Factcheck:  Billions are pouring into NATO because of the Trump administration (four Pinocchios)

During a speech in Poland last week, President Donald Trump said about about his calls for increased defense spending by other countries for NATO, “As a result of this insistence, billions of dollars more have begun to pour into NATO.”

“These budget decisions were made during the 2016 calendar year, before Trump became president,” reported Michelle Ye Hee Lee, for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. She quoted Alexander Vershbow, former deputy secretary general of NATO, who said: “Who deserves the most credit? Vladimir Putin. It was the invasion of Crimea, the launching of insurgency backed by Russia in Eastern Ukraine, that was the wake-up call for the majority of the allies.”



Factcheck: hundreds of thousands will die if the Senate health care bill passes (can’t say)

With the Senate debating health care reform, FactCheck.org checked a recent statement by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif, where she said, “We do know that… hundreds of thousands of people will die if this bill (Senate health care bill) passes.”

Lori Robertson and Robert Farley wrote, “the research uses terms like ‘could’ and ‘suggests’ and ‘cannot definitively demonstrate a causal relationship,’ not the definitive ‘will’ favored by opponents of the bill. We can’t say whether any specific projection is a correct or valid number.”

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TV news fact-checked: health care & more + this press briefing will not be televised

by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman

This week the Senate released its version of health care, so to mark the occasion we offer a trio of recent health care fact checks from The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker. Other fact-checking highlights include: a claim that Saudia Arabia has been spending money on Trump hotels (true, says PolitiFact) and Ivanka Trump asserts American workers have a skill gap (also true, reports Politifact).

But before we present these fact-checks, we pause for a moment to present this commentary from CNN’s Jim Acosta on the White House’s refusal to allow cameras in a growing number of press briefings: “That wouldn’t be tolerated in city council meetings, or at a governor’s press conference,” he noted. “And here we have the representative of the president of the United States saying no you can’t cover it that way….it’s like we’re not even covering a White House anymore…it’s like we’re just covering bad reality television, is what it feels like now.”

Claim: 1.8 million jobs will be lost as a result of the AHCA (two Pinocchios)

Earlier this month, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., said, “Americans will lose their health coverage because of his proposal. And it is a job loser. Estimated to be 1.8 million jobs lost. Donald Trump is a job loser.”

Glenn Kessler reported for the Washington Post’s Fact Checker: “We often warn readers to be wary of job claims made by politicians based on think-tank studies. This is a case in point. Pelosi was careful to say ‘estimated,’ but two groups of researchers, using apparently the same economic model, came up with different estimates of jobs losses under the AHCA by 2022 – 1.8 million and 413,000.”

Claim: the reconciliation process will be used for the AHCA (upside down Pinocchio or flip-flop)

At a recent press briefing, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., described the upcoming legislative process for the American Health Care Act, “Unfortunately, it will have to be a Republicans-only exercise. But we’re working hard to get there.”

Kessler responded that “McConnell’s position has changed, even though he will not acknowledge it. He was against the reconciliation process for health care in 2010; he has embraced it now. He was against secrecy and closed-door dealmaking before; he now oversees the most secretive health-care bill process ever. And he was against voting on a bill that was broadly unpopular — and now he is pushing for a bill even more unpopular than the ACA in 2010.”

Claim: insurers are leaving the health care exchanges because of Obamacare (three Pinocchios)

President Donald Trump talked with Republican senators about health care, saying among other claims, “Insurers are fleeing the market. Last week it was announced that one of the largest insurers is pulling out of Ohio — the great state of Ohio.”

 Kessler wrote that Trump “ignores that many say they are exiting the business because of uncertainty created by the Trump administration, in particular whether it will continue to pay ‘cost-sharing reductions’ to insurance companies. These payments help reduce co-pays and deductibles for low-income patients on the exchanges. Without those subsidies, insurance companies have to foot more of the bill.” 

Claim: Saudi Arabia is spending big on Trump Hotels (mostly true)

The attorney general for the District of Columbia, Karl Racine, said at a recent press conference that “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose government has important business and policy before the president of the United States, has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Trump International Hotel.”

Smitha Rajan reported for PolitiFact, “The Foreign Agent Registration Act report mentions at least one filing which clearly shows that the Saudi government spent $270,000 at the Trump International Hotel for lodging and boarding expenses between October 2016 and March 2017. It’s not clear whether the entire expenses were paid before or after Trump became president. Our research showed it was some of  both.”

Claim: there are 6 million job openings but workers don’t have the skills needed (true)

During a recent interview on Fox & Friends, Ivanka Trump, assistant to the president and daughter of the president, said “There are 6 million available American jobs, so we’re constantly hearing from CEO’s that they have job openings, but they don’t have workers with the skill set they need to fill those jobs.”

For PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson rated her claim “true,” reporting “The number she cites is correct, and she’s right to say that the skills gap plays a role. Economists warn against overestimating the role played by the skills gap in all 6 million job openings, both because other factors play a role (such as the image gap) and because the skills barriers posed are often more modest than having to earn an academic degree or to obtain specialized training.”

TV news fact-checked: Comey, Schumer, McMaster, Mueller

It was a yet another extraordinary week in U.S. politics, with a series of explosive news reports centering on President Donald Trump. The TV News Archive is saving history as it happens, as well as linking relevant fact-checks by FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker to statements by public officials.

On Sunday shows, Schumer demands release of tapes–if they exist

Senate Majority Leader Charles “Chuck” Schumer, D., N.Y., made the rounds of Sunday news talk shows, appearing on “Meet the Press” and “State of the Union,” calling for a special prosecutor to investigate possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia among other matters. In this clip, Schumer says Trump should turn over tapes–the possibility of which were raised by Trump in a tweet on May 12–if they exist, of the president’s conversations with now former FBI director James Comey.

In this piece titled “Trump vs. Comey,” FactCheck.org reporters Eugene Kiely and Robert Farley trace the history of statements by the president and Comey about their discussions. They note, “White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has repeatedly refused to answer whether Trump has such recordings. In his interview with Jeanine Pirro, Trump said, “Well, that I can’t talk about. I won’t talk about that.”

McMaster reacts to report that Trump shared intelligence with Russians

After The Washington Post reported, on May 15, that Trump had revealed “highly classified information” to Russian envoys visiting the White House last week, national security adviser H.R. McMaster defended the president that day and at a press conference the following day. Among his assertions: “The story that came out tonight as reported is false.”

“The key phrase is “as reported,” wrote Glenn Kessler, for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, in a piece that dissects McMaster’s statements before the press. “With this language, McMaster in theory could dispute any element, no matter how small, as false. He notably did not say the story was false.” John Kruzel, writing for PolitiFact, traced the “shifting” explanations from the White House on what happened at the meeting with the Russians, including McMaster’s statements.

Former FBI director Robert Mueller appointed special counsel

Wednesday, May 17 brought the news that the U.S. Department of Justice appointed Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate possible connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Here PolitiFact reporter Lauren Carroll gives the basics on Mueller’s background and experience.

The TV News Archive contains numerous historical clips of Mueller, who served as FBI director under  Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, including this brief farewell interview he gave to ABC in 2013, where he talks about terrorism.

Mueller and Comey have an earlier association at a high-drama moment in U.S. history. In 2014, Comey told “60 Minutes” about the day that he and Mueller visited a bedridden John Ashcroft, then attorney general, to tell him they would resign rather than reauthorize a controversial domestic surveillance program under pressure from the White House. Ashcroft deferred to Comey, and, as recounted by The Los Angeles Times, “It was only when President George W. Bush agreed to listen to Comey and Mueller and restructure the program did resignation plans go away.”

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Find O’Reilly Factor clips on TV News Archive

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.

TV news highlights with fact checks

By Nancy Watzman and Katie Dahl

Last week, our national fact checking partners concentrated on two events featuring President Donald Trump: a press conference on February 16, and his rally in Melbourne, Florida on February 18. The Conservative Political Action Conference is being hosted this week. Look out for fact-checking of President Trump’s speech soon.  Here are some highlights, along with TV news segments from the Trump Archive and TV News Archive.

Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus addressed the conference yesterday. Bannon again called the press the “opposition party.”

Claim: Obama released Gitmo detainee that recently became a suicide bomber (wasn’t him)

Deputy assistant to the president, Sebastian Gorka, on Fox & Friends: “So President Obama released lots and lots of people that were there for a very good reason, and what happened? Almost half the time, they returned to the battlefield. This individual… goes and executes a suicide attack in Iraq.” At FactCheck.org, Farley wrote “Gorka wrongly suggested the man was released by President Barack Obama. He was transferred… President George W. Bush… then wrongly claimed that among detainees released by Obama, ‘almost half the time, they returned to the battlefield.’ According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, about 12.4 percent of those transferred from Gitmo under Obama are either confirmed or suspected of reengaging.”

Claim: there are 13, 14, 15 million undocumented people in the country (too high)

At a press briefing this week, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said “12, 14, 15 million people [are] in the country illegally,” but Yee gave him Three Pinocchios for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. “Spicer’s statement that there are about 12 million people in the country illegally is safely within the margin of error in credible demographics research. But once he enters the realm of ‘13, 14, 15 million’ or ‘potentially more,’ his claim becomes problematic.”

Claim: Thomas Jefferson said “nothing can be believed which is seen in a newspaper.” (out of context)

At his rally in Florida, Trump said President Thomas Jefferson had said that “nothing can be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself….becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”

However, “Trump selectively quotes from Jefferson here, who, for most of his life, was a fierce defender of the need for a free press,” Kessler wrote for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. PolitiFact staff made a similar point, using this quote as evidence: “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Claim: something happened in Sweden. (Not exactly)

By far the quote that received the most attention from the president’s rally were his comments about Sweden: “We’ve got to keep our country safe … You 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.”

“This was a very strange comment. Nothing had happened the night before in Sweden,” wrote Kessler for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.  A White House spokesperson said later that he “was talking about rising crime and recent incidents in general and not referring to a specific incident.”

PolitiFact reporter Miriam Valverde reported on the Fox news interview on Swedish crime rates, which aired the night before the rally and purportedly inspired Trump’s comments. Valverde quoted several Swedish experts countering the argument that crime rates are rising in Sweden, including political scientist Henrik Selin, who said that “[i]n general, crime statistics have gone down the last (few) years, and no there is no evidence to suggest that new waves of immigration has lead to increased crime.”

Robert Farley reported for  FactCheck.org, “Swedish authorities and criminologists say President Donald Trump is exaggerating crime in Sweden as a result of its liberal policy of accepting refugees from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries.”

Claim: The stock market has hit record numbers (mostly true)

The President mentioned the economy at a press conference, saying “The stock market has hit record numbers, as you know. And there has been a tremendous surge of optimism in the business world.” At PolitiFact, Miriam Valverde rated this as “Mostly True,” reporting “All three major stock indexes closed at record highs for five days in row on Feb. 15.”

Claim: the media is less trustworthy than Congress (mostly false, but…)

Also at the press conference, President Trump excoriated the media, saying journalists “will not tell you the truth and treat the wonderful people of our country with the respect that they deserve,” that the “press is out of control,” and that the media has a “lower approval rate than Congress, I think that’s right, I don’t know.”

PolitiFact reporter Jon Greenberg rated the trust claim as “mostly false”: “Congress actually ranks below the news media, according to surveys from three different research groups spanning several years. In two polls, mistrust in the media broke 40 percent, which is hardly anything to brag about. But in those studies, mistrust in Congress was over 50 percent.”

Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee at The Washington Post’s Fact Checker agreed that Congress ranks lower than the media–but that that isn’t saying much: “[B]esides Congress, only ‘big business’ ranks lower than the media — but it’s enough to make Trump’s claim incorrect.”

FactCheck.org chimed in, noting that the “public’s approval of Congress is lower than its trust in the media,” but pointed out there’s more public trust in Trump than in the media: “Trump would have been correct to say that trust in the media is even lower than approval of himself. According to Gallup, Trump’s approval rating stood at 41 percent, as of the week ending Feb. 12, while the public’s trust in the media was down to 32 percent.”  

Claim: Trump had biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan. (False)

President Trump claimed his victory marked “the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan.” NBC reporter Peter Alexander challenged him on the spot, saying, “Why should Americans trust you when you have accused information they have received as being fake when you have been providing information that is fake?” Trump didn’t answer the question, but rather pivoted by asking whether the reporter agreed that his victory was substantial.  

According to our fact-checking partners, there have been three presidents since Reagan who received more electoral college votes than Trump. FactCheck.org noted “Trump’s Electoral College victory margin ranks 46th out of 58 presidential elections.” Kessler and Lee wrote: “Of the nine presidential elections since 1984, Trump’s electoral college win ranks seventh.”

Claim: Hillary Clinton gave away 20 percent of the uranium in the United States (false)

President Trump asserted a claim the Washington Post Fact Checker has given Four Pinocchios, that Hillary Clinton “gave away 20 percent of the uranium in the United States,” going on to say, “you know what uranium is, right? This thing called nuclear weapons and other things like lots of things are done with uranium, including some bad things.” insinuate that the uranium could be used in a Russian nuclear weapon. FactCheck.org wrote: “The deal Clinton had a role in approving gave Russia ownership of 20 percent of U.S. production capacity — not existing stocks of uranium. Furthermore, Clinton alone could not have stopped the deal; only the president could have done that with a finding that national security would be endangered. Lastly, none of the uranium goes to Russia. That would require export licenses.”

 

How the Internet Archive is hacking the election

There are thirteen days until Election Day — not that we’re counting.

In this most bizarre, unruly, terrifying, fascinating election year, the Internet Archive has been in the thick of it. We’re using technology to give journalists, researchers and the public the power to take the political junk food that’s typically spoon fed to all of us—the political ads, the presidential debates, the TV news broadcasts—and help us to scrutinize the labels, dig into the content, and turn that meal into something more nutritious.

political ad archivePolitical ads. We’ve archived more than 2,600 different ads over at the Political TV Ad Archive and used the open source Duplitron created by senior technologist Dan Schultz to count nearly 300,000 airings of the TV ads across 26 media markets. We’ve linked the ads to OpenSecrets.org information on the sponsors—whether it’s a super PAC, a candidate committee, or a nonprofit “dark money” group.

Journalists have used the underlying metadata to visualize this information creatively, whether it’s the moment when anti-Trump ads started popping up in Florida (FiveThirtyEight.com), revealing how Ted Cruz favors “The Sound of Music”  (Time.com), or turning the experience of being an Iowa voter deluged with campaign ads into an 8-bit arcade-style video game (The Atlantic).

Meanwhile, our fact checking partners at FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, have fact checked 116 archived ads and counting, not just for the presidential candidates but for U.S. Senate, House, and local campaigns as well. Of the 70 ads fact check by PolitiFact reporters, nearly half have earned ratings ranging from “Mostly false” to “Pants on Fire!”

Example: this “Pants on Fire!” ad played nearly 300 times in Cleveland, Ohio, in August, where Democrat Ted Strickland is facing incumbent Senate Rob Portman, a Republican, in a competitive race.  The claim: that as governor, Democrat Ted Strickland proposed deep budget cuts and then “wasted over $250,000 remodeling his bathrooms at the governor’s mansion.” While it’s true Strickland proposed budget cuts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the money used to renovate the governor’s mansion didn’t come from that pool of money. What’s more, the bathrooms in question were not for the governor’s personal use, but rather for tourists who come to visit the mansion.

Presidential debates. In the recent presidential debates, the Internet Archive opened up the TV News Archive to offer near real-time broadcasts while the candidates were still on the stage. Journalists and fact checkers used this online resource to share clips of key points in the debate.

Example: during the third presidential debate, Farai Chideya, a reporter for FiveThirtyEight.com, linked to this clip in a live blog about the debate, noting that abortion is a key issue for Trump’s core supporters.

Twenty-five hours after the debate, we learned that the public made 85 quotes from our TV News Archive debate footage, and that viewers played these more than one million times—a healthy response to this brand new experiment.

TV News. When the debates were over, we used the Duplitron on TV news to tally which debate clips were shared on such networks as CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC and shows such as “Good Morning America” and the “Today show.” Journalists used our downloadable data to create visualizations to show how TV News shows present the debates to viewers.

nytExample: this interactive visualization in The New York Times shows readers how the different cable news networks presented the first debates, and highlights the differences between them.

The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Fusion and The Atlantic all have used the data to visualize how the debates were portrayed for viewers. In addition, we’re keeping our eyes open and Duplitron turned on for tracking how TV news shows cover other key video. For example, we have data on how TV news shows used clips from the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump bragged about groping women, and his subsequent apology.

In the thirteen days remaining before the election, we’ll continue to track airings of political ads in key battleground state markets, work with fact checking and journalist partners, and stay on the TV news beat with attention to breaking news.

And when it’s all over, we’re looking forward to working with our partners to figure out what just happened, what we’ve learned, and how we can help in the future.