Tag Archives: Tom Perez

TV News Record: Glorious ContextuBot making progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

To date, the team has:

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

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


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

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


The Washington Post examines coverage of Parkland shooting

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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TV news 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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