Experiments Day Hackathon 2017

Posted on September 22, 2017 by mek

Join us this Saturday, September 23 @ 10:30am PT for our Experiments Day Hackathon

It’s almost that time again — October 11 — the day the Internet Archive invites you to celebrate another year of preserving our cultural heritage and the progress our community has made towards  building tools that facilitate universal access to all knowledge.

Making these collections as discoverable and accessible as possible is a huge task, and we need your help! It’s often our community members who bring our items to life.

Now’s your chance!

Champions of open-access, unite: This Saturday, September 23 @ 10:30am PT,  join us in person at the  Internet Archive HQ or joins us remotely online for an Experiments Day Hackathon; a day of camaraderie and civic action fuelled by fresh ground coffee and abundant amounts of pizza.

Let’s team up to prototype experimental interfaces, remix content, and build tools to make knowledge more accessible to those who need it most.

What experiments would you craft with 2M hours or tv news, 5B archived images, 3M books, and petabytes of free storage? Proposed themes include #decentralization, #accessibility, #books, #scholarly-papers, #annotations.

We’ve helped backup over 2M hours of television news, hundreds of billions of webpages through time, audio for tens of thousands of live music concerts and 78rpms, and have helped digitize and lend millions of public domain and modern books. The breadth, archival quality, and uniqueness of our collections make the Internet Archive a rich terrain for experimentation and hacking.  Many of our top engineers will be on hand to guide you through the APIs to build with.

Then, be sure to come back on October 11 for our annual celebration, where many of our experiments will be on display!

Register/RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/internet-archive-experiments-hackathon-2017-tickets-37012125263

Join our chat: https://gitter.im/ArchiveExperiments/Lobby

Schedule + more event details: https://experiments.archivelab.org/hackathon

Watch remotely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJov5X5Sht4

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TV news chyron data provide ways to explore breaking news reports & bias

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Nancy Watzman

Today the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive announces a new way to plumb our TV news collections to see how news stories are reported: data feeds for the news that appears as chyrons on the lower thirds of TV screens.  Our Third Eye project scans the lower thirds of TV screens, using OCR, or optical character recognition, to turn these fleeting missives into downloadable data ripe for analysis.  At launch, Third Eye tracks BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and contains more than four million chyrons captured in just over two weeks.

Download Third Eye data. API and TSV options available.

Follow Third Eye on Twitter.

Third Eye joins a growing suite of TV News Archive tools that help researchers, journalists, and the public analyze how news is filtered through TV and presented to the public. These include Face-o-Matic, created through a partnership with Matroid, which uses facial recognition to find top political leaders on TV news shows; and Television Explorer, an interface created by data scientist Kalev Leetaru that allows easy searching and visualization of TV News Archive closed captioning. The Political TV Ad Archive used audio fingerprinting to find airings of political ads in the 2016 elections, and the Trump and U.S. Congress archives provide a quick way to see news clips featuring top political figures, alongside associated fact checks by FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker.

Breaking news often appears as chyrons on TV before newscasters begin reporting or video is available, whether the subject is a hurricane or a breaking political story. Which chyrons a TV news network chooses to display often reveals editorial decisions that can demonstrate a particular slant on the news. With Third Eye data, investigations by journalists, fact-checkers, researchers, can explore how messages are delivered to the public in near real-time.

Third Eye on Twitter tweets the most clear, representative chyron from a one-minute period on a particular TV news channel. This can serve as an alert system, showing how TV networks are reporting news.

For example, on September 6, 2017, in the midst of a heavy news day featuring Hurricane Irma, the debate over a deal on immigration, and other stories, TV news cable networks began to show the breaking news that Facebook had turned over information about $100,000 in ads purchased by Russian sources during the 2016 elections to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Our Third Eye CNN Twitter bot tweeted out this chyron recorded at 2:38 pm Pacific Standard Time.

Here is the corresponding clip as it appears on the TV News Archive.

At 2:51 p.m., MSNBC ran this chyron: “FACEBOOK: WE SOLD POLITICAL ADS DURING ELECTION TO COMPANY LIKELY OPERATED IN RUSSIA.” The corresponding clip is below.

However, our data do not show Fox News running any chyrons on the Facebook ad news that day. To cross-check, we used Television Explorer, a tool for searching TV News Archive closed captions. (Captions differ from chyrons; captions capture what news anchors are actually saying, as opposed to chyrons, which feature text chosen by the TV channel to run at the bottom of the screen.) Television Explorer shows CNN and MSNBC covering the story on September 6, but not Fox News.

However, the Facebook ad story did make it on to the Fox News website during the 2 p.m. hour, as this search on the Wayback Machine shows.

This is just one example of the way that researchers might use Third Eye chyron data in conjunction with other tools to explore how a particular story is portrayed on TV news. We’d love for others to dig in, explore, and give us feedback on this new public data source.

More on Third Eye data

The work of the Internet Archive’s TV architect Tracey Jaquith, the Third Eye project applies OCR to the “lower thirds” of TV cable news screens to capture the text that appears there. The chyrons are not captions, which provide the text for what people are saying on screen, but rather are narrative display text that accompanies news broadcasts.

Created in real-time by TV news editors, chyrons sometimes include misspellings. The OCR process also frequently adds another element where text is not rendered correctly, leading to entries that may be garbled. To make sense out of the noise, Jaquith applies algorithms that choose the most representative chyrons from each channel collected over 60-second increments. This cleaned-up feed is what fuels the Twitter bots that post which chyrons are appearing on TV news screens.

We provide options to download this filtered feed and/or the raw feed nearly as soon as it appears on the TV screen. Both may be useful depending on the type of project. In addition, the Twitter feed itself is a good source to see what the filtered feed looks like.

Some notes:

  • Chryons are derived in near real-time from the TV News Archive‘s collection of TV news. The constantly updating public collection contains 1.4 million TV news shows, some dating back to 2009.
  • At launch, Third Eye captures four TV cable news channels: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
  • Data can be affected by temporary collection outages, which typically can last minutes or hours, but rarely more. If you are concerned about a specific time gap in a feed and would like to know if it’s the result of an outage, please inquire at tvnews@archive.org.
  • The “raw feed” option provides all of the OCR’ed text from chryons at the rate of approximately one entry per second. The “filtered tweets feed” provides the data that fuels our Twitter bots; this has been filtered to find the most representative, clearest chyrons from a 60-second period, with no more than one entry/tweet per minute (though the duration may be shorter than 60 seconds.) The filtered feed relies on algorithms that are a work in progress; we invite you to share your ideas on how to effectively filter the noise from the raw data.
  • Dates/times are in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) in API feeds, PST (Pacific Standard Time) in tweets.
  • Because the size of the raw data is so large (about 20 megabytes per day), we limit results to seven days per request.
  • We began collecting raw data on August 25, 2017; the filtered feed begins on September 7, 2017.
  • “Duration” column is in seconds–the amount of time that particular chyron appeared on the screen.
  • To view clips in context on the TV News Archive, paste “https://archive.org/details/” before the field that begins with a channel name. For example, “FOXNEWSW_20170919_100000_FOX__Friends/start/792” becomes “https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20170919_100000_FOX__Friends/start/792”

We want to hear from you! Please contact us with questions, feedback, concerns – and also to tell us what project you’ve done with the TV News Archive’s Third Eye project: tvnews@archive.org. Follow us @tvnewsarchive, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Thanks to Robin Chin, Katie Dahl, Dan Schultz, and the TV News Archive director, Roger Macdonald, for contributing to this project.

 

 

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MacArthur Foundation’s $100 Million Award Finalists

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Wendy Hanamura

Today, the MacArthur Foundation announced the finalists for its 100&Change competition, awarding a single organization $100 million to solve one of the world’s biggest problems. The Internet Archive’s Open Libraries project, one of eight semifinalists, did not make the cut to the final round. Today we want congratulate the 100&Change finalists and thank the MacArthur Foundation for inspiring us to think big. For the last 15 months, the Internet Archive team has been building the partnerships that can transform US libraries for the digital age and put millions of ebooks in the hands of more than a billion learners. We’ve collaborated with the world’s top copyright experts to clarify the legal framework for libraries to digitize and lend their collections. And we’ve learned an amazing amount from the leading organizations serving the blind and people with disabilities that impact reading.  

To us, that feels like a win.

In the words of MacArthur Managing Director, Cecilia Conrad:

The Internet Archive project will unlock and make accessible bodies of knowledge currently located on library shelves across the country. The proposal for curation, with the selection of books driven not by commercial interests but by intellectual and cultural significance, is exciting. Though the legal theory regarding controlled digital lending has not been tested in the courts, we found the testimony from legal experts compelling. The project has an experienced, thoughtful and passionate team capable of redefining the role of the public library in the 21st Century.

Copyright scholar and Berkeley Law professor, Pam Samuelson (center), convenes a gathering of more than twenty legal experts to help clarify the legal basis for libraries digitizing and lending physical books in their collections.

So, the Internet Archive and our partners are continuing to build upon the 100&Change momentum. We are meeting October 11-13 to refine our plans, and we invite interested stakeholders to join us at the Library Leaders Forum. If you are a philanthropist interested in leveraging technology to provide more open access to information—well, we have a project for you.

For 20 years, at the Internet Archive we have passionately pursued one goal: providing universal access to knowledge. But there is almost a century of books missing from our digital shelves, beyond the reach of so many who need them. So we cannot stop. We now have the technology, the partners and the plan to transform library hard copies into digital books and lend them as libraries always have. So all of us building Open Libraries are moving ahead.

Members of the Open Libraries Team at the Internet Archive headquarters, part of a global movement to provide more equitable access to knowledge.

Remember: a century ago, Andrew Carnegie funded a vast network of public libraries because he recognized democracy can only exist when citizens have equal access to diverse information. Libraries are more important than ever, welcoming all of society to use their free resources, while respecting readers’ privacy and dignity. Our goal is to build an enduring asset for libraries across this nation, ensuring that all citizens—including our most vulnerable—have equal and unfettered access to knowledge.

Thank you, MacArthur Foundation, for inspiring us to turn that idea into a well thought-out project.

Onward!

–The Open Libraries Team

Posted in Announcements, Books Archive, News, Open Library | Leave a comment

TV News Record: Debt ceiling, hurricane funding, GDP

Posted on September 14, 2017 by Nancy Watzman

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.

In this week’s TV News Archive roundup, we examine the latest Face-o-Matic data (you can too!); and present our partner’s fact-checks on Sen. Ted Cruz’s claims that Hurricane Sandy emergency funding was filled with “unrelated pork” and President Donald Trump’s claims about other country’s GDPs.

What got political leaders sustained face-time on TV news last week?

What got Trump, McConnell, Schumer, Ryan, and Pelosi the longest clips on TV cable news screens this past week? Thanks to our new trove of Face-O-Matic data developed with the start-up Matroid’s facial recognition algorithms, reporters and researchers can get quick answers to questions like these.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., got almost six minutes – an unusually large amount of sustained face-time for the Democrat from California – from “MSNBC Live” on September 7 covering her press conference following President Donald Trump’s surprise deal with congressional Democrats on the debt ceiling.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., also enjoyed his longest sustained face-time segment last week on the debt ceiling, clocking in at 34 seconds on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., got 11 minutes on September 7 on Fox News’ “Happening Now,” for his weekly press conference, where he was shown discussing a variety of topics, including Hurricane Harvey, tax reform, and also debt relief. For Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D., N.Y., the topic that got him the most sustained time–21 seconds–was also his unexpected deal with the president on the debt ceiling.

For President Donald Trump, however, who never lacks for TV news face-time, his longest sustained appearance on TV news this past week was his speech at this week’s 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon.

Fact-check: Hurricane Sandy relief was 2/3 filled with pork and unrelated spending (false)

In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, Sen. Ted Cruz, R., Texas, came under criticism by supporting federal funding for Harvey victims while having opposed such funding for victims of Hurricane Sandy in 2013.  Cruz defended himself by saying, “The problem with that particular bill is it became a $50 billion bill that was filled with unrelated pork. Two-thirds of that bill had nothing to do with Sandy.”

But Lori Robertson of FactCheck.org labeled this claim as “false,” noting that a Congressional Research Service study pegged at least 69 percent of that bill’s funding as related to Sandy, and that even more of the money could be attributed to hurricane relief funding: “Cruz could have said he thought the Sandy relief legislation included too many non-emergency items. That’s fair enough, and his opinion. But he was wrong to specifically say two-thirds of the bill “had nothing to do with Sandy,” or “little or nothing to do with Hurricane Sandy.”

Fact-check: Trump spoke with world leader unhappy with nine percent GDP growth rate (three Pinocchios)

At a recent press conference on his tax reform plan, President Donald Trump remarked that other foreign leaders are unhappy with higher rates of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) than the U.S. has. “I spoke to a leader of a major, major country recently. Big, big country. They say ‘our country is very big, it’s hard to grow.’ Well believe me this country is very big. How are you doing, I said. ‘Cause I have very good relationships believe it or not with the leaders of these countries. I said, how are you doing? He said ‘not good, not good at all. Our GDP is 7 percent.’ I say 7 percent? Then I speak to another one. ‘Not good. Not good. Our GDP is only 9 percent.’”

Nicole Lewis of The Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave this claim “three Pinocchios”: “Of the 58 heads of state he’s met or spoke with since taking office, not one can claim 9 percent GDP growth. Perhaps Trump misheard. Or perhaps the other leader was fibbing. Or maybe Trump just thought the pitch for a tax cut sounded better if he could quote two leaders….In any case, Trump is making a major economic error in comparing the GDP of a developed country to a developing one. For his half-truths, and for comparing apples to oranges, Trump receives Three Pinocchios.”

To receive the TV News Archive’s email newsletter, subscribe here.

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Rubbing the Internet Archive

Posted on September 13, 2017 by David Rinehart

In July 2017, Los Angeles-based artist Katie Herzog visited our headquarters in San Francisco and created Rubbing the Internet Archive — a 10-foot high by 84-foot wide rubbing of the exterior of the building, made using rubbing wax on non-fusible interfacing. The imposing 1923 building—formerly a Christian Science church and now a library—features an intricate facade that translated well into two dimensions.

The drawing is now adhered to the walls of Klowden Mann’s main exhibition space allowing the to-scale exterior of the Internet Archive to form the interior built-environment of the gallery.

Rubbing the Internet Archive is on view at Klowden Mann, 6023 Washington Blvd., Culver City, California, through October 14th.



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Face-o-Matic data show Trump dominates – Fox focuses on Pelosi; MSNBC features McConnell

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Nancy Watzman

For every ten minutes that TV cable news shows featured President Donald Trump’s face on the screen this past summer, the four congressional leaders’ visages were presented  for one minute, according an analysis of Face-o-Matic downloadable, free data fueled by the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive and made available to the public today.

Face-o-Matic is an experimental service, developed in collaboration with the start-up Matroid, that tracks the faces of selected high level elected officials on major TV cable news channels: CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the BBC. First launched as a Slack app in July, the TV News Archive, after receiving feedback from journalists, is now making the underlying data available to the media, researchers, and the public. It will be updated daily here.

Unlike caption-based searches, Face-o-Matic uses facial recognition algorithms to recognize individuals on TV news screens. Face-o-Matic finds images of people when TV news shows use clips of the lawmakers speaking; frequently, however, the lawmakers’ faces also register if their photos or clips are being used to illustrate a story, or they appear as part of a montage as the news anchor talks.  Alongside closed caption research, these data provide an additional metric to analyze how TV news cable networks present public officials to their millions of viewers.

Our concentration on public officials and our bipartisan tracking is purposeful; in experimenting with this technology, we strive to respect individual privacy and extract only information for which there is a compelling public interest, such as the role the public sees our elected officials playing through the filter of TV news. The TV News Archive is committed to doing this right by adhering to these Artificial Intelligence principles for ethical research developed by leading artificial intelligence researchers, ethicists, and others at a January 2017 conference organized by the Future of Life Institute. As we go forward with our experiments, we will continue to explore these questions in conversations with experts and the public.

Download Face-o-Matic data here.

We want to hear from you:

What other faces would you like us to track? For example, should we start by adding the faces of foreign leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and South Korea’s Kim Jong-un? Should we add former President Barack Obama and contender Hillary Clinton? Members of the White House staff? Other members of Congress?

Do you have any technical feedback? If so, please let us know what they are by contacting tvnews@archive.org or participating in the GitHub Face-o-Matic page.

Trump dominates, Pelosi gets little face-time

Overall, between July 13 through September 5, analysis of Face-o-Matic data show:

  • All together, we found 7,930 minutes, or some 132 hours, of face-time for President Donald Trump and the four congressional leaders. Of that amount, Trump dominated with 90 percent of the face-time. Collectively, the four congressional leaders garnered 15 hours of face-time.
  • House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., got the least amount of time on the screen: just 1.4 hours over the whole period.
  • Of the congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s face was found most often: 7.6 hours, compared to 3.8 hours for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis.; 1.7 hours for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D., N.Y., and 1.4 hours for Pelosi.
  • The congressional leaders got bumps in coverage when they were at the center of legislative fights, such as in this clip of McConnell aired by CNN, in which the senator is shown speaking on July 25 about the upcoming health care reform vote. Schumer got coverage on the same date from the network in this clip of him talking about the Russia investigation. Ryan got a huge boost on CNN when the cable network aired his town hall on August 21.

Fox shows most face-time for Pelosi; MSNBC, most Trump and McConnell

The liberal cable network MSNBC gave Trump more face-time than any other network. Ditto for McConnell. A number of these stories highlight tensions between the senate majority leader and the president. For example, here, on August 25, the network uses a photo of McConnell, and then a clip of both McConnell and Ryan, to illustrate a report on Trump “trying to distance himself” from GOP leaders. In this excerpt, from an August 21 broadcast, a clip of McConnell speaking is shown in the background to illustrate his comments that “most news is not fake,” which is interpreted as “seem[ing] to take a shot at the president.”

MSNBC uses photos of both Trump and McConnell in August 12 story on “feud” between the two.

While Pelosi does not get much face-time on any of the cable news networks examined, Fox News shows her face more than any other. In this commentary report on August 20, Jesse Waters criticizes Pelosi for favoring the removal of confederate statues placed in the Capitol building. “Miss Pelosi has been in Congress for 30 years. Now she speaks up?” On August 8, “Special Report With Bret Baier” uses a clip of Pelosi talking in favor of women having a right to choose the size and timing of her family as an “acid test for party base.”

Example of Fox News using a photo of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to illustrate a story, in this case about a canceled San Francisco rally.

While the BBC gives some Trump face-time, it gives scant attention to the congressional leaders. Proportionately, however, the BBC gives Trump less face-time than any of the U.S. networks.

On July 13 the BBC’s “Outside Source” ran a clip of Trump talking about his son, Donald Trump, Jr.’s, meeting with a Russian lobbyist.

For details about the data available, please visit the Face-O-Matic page. The TV News Archive is an online, searchable, public archive of 1.4 million TV news programs aired from 2009 to the present.  This service allows researchers and the public to use television as a citable and sharable reference. Face-O-Matic is part of ongoing experiments in generating metadata for reporters and researchers, enabling analysis of the messages that bombard us daily in public discourse.

 

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Why Bitcoin is on the Internet Archive’s Balance Sheet

Posted on September 2, 2017 by Brewster Kahle

 

A foundation was curious as to why we have Bitcoin on our balance sheet, and I thought I would explain it publicly.

The Internet Archive explores how bitcoin and other Internet innovations can be useful in the non-profit sphere– this is part of it. We want to see how donated bitcoin can be used, not just sold off. We are doing this publicly so others can learn from us.   And it is fun.  And it is interesting.

We started receiving donations in bitcoin in 2012, the first year we got about 2,700 and we sold them to an employee who was heavily involved (for the prevailing $2 per bitcoin). The next year, we held onto them and offered them to employees as an optional way to get their salary– ⅓ took some. We set up an ATM at the Internet Archive. We got the sushi place next door to take bitcoins, and encouraged our employees to buy books at Green Apple Books in bitcoin. We set up a vanity address. Started taking bitcoin in our swag store. Tried (and failed) to get our credit union to help bitcoin firms.

Another year we gave a small amount to people as an xmas bonus to those that set up a wallet (from a matching grant of bitcoins from me).

We paid vendors and contractors in bitcoin when they wanted it. Starting getting micropayments from the Brave Browser. Hosted a movie with filmmakers on living on bitcoin. We publicly tested if people are stealing bitcoins like the press was saying (didn’t steal ours).

A few years later, the price had gone up so much, I personally bought some at the going rate to decrease financial risk to the Internet Archive, but then I did not just cash those in for dollars. We may seem like we are geniuses, but we are not, we saw the price go down as well and we did not sell out then either.

Recently Zcash folks helped us set up a Zcash address, and would love people to donate there.

What we are doing is trying to “play the game” and see how it works for non-profits. It is not an investment for us, it is testing a technology in an open way. If you want to see the donations to us in bitcoin, they are here. Zcash here.

Bitcoin donations have been decreasing in recent years, which may reflect we are not moving with the times. I am hoping that someone will say, gosh, I will donate a thousand bitcoins to these guys who have been so good :). Here is to hoping.

So the Internet Archive has some bitcoin on its balance sheet to be a living example of an organization that is trying this innovative Internet technology. We do the same with bittorrent, tor, and decentralized web tech.

Please donate and we will put them to good use supporting the Internet Archive’s mission.

 

Posted in Announcements | 2 Comments

The Internet Archive’s Annual Bash – Come Celebrate With Us!

Posted on August 30, 2017 by Katie Barrett

What’s your personal rabbit hole?

78 rpm recordings?
20th Century women writers?
Friendster sites?
Vintage software?
Educational films from the 50s?

Find out at the Internet Archive’s Annual Bash:

The Internet Archive invites you to enter our 20th Century Time Machine to experience the audio, books, films, web sites, ephemera and software fast disappearing from our midst. We’ll be connecting the centuries—transporting 20th century treasures to curious minds in the 21st. Come explore the possibilities at our annual bash on Wednesday, October 11, 2017, from 5-9:30 pm.

Tickets start at $15 here.

We’ll kick off the evening with cocktails, food trucks and hands-on demos of our coolest collections. Come scan a book, play in a virtual reality arcade, or spin a 78 rpm recording. When you arrive, be sure to get your library card. If you “check out” all the stations on your card, we’ll reward you with a special Internet Archive gift.

Starting at 7 p.m., we’ll unveil the latest media the Internet Archive has to offer, presented by the artists, writers, and scientists who lose themselves in our collections every day. And to keep you dancing into the evening, DJ Phast Phreddie the Boogaloo Omnibus, will once again be spinning records from 8-9:30. Come join our celebration!

Event Info:                    Wednesday, October 11th
5pm: Cocktails, food trucks, and hands-on demos
7pm: Program
8pm: Dessert and Dancing

Location:  Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco

Get your tickets now!

Free bike valet parking available!

 

Posted in Announcements, Event, News | 6 Comments

TV News Record: Trump eclipses sun (at least on TV news)

Posted on August 25, 2017 by Nancy Watzman

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.

In this week’s round up, we ask whether the eclipse eclipsed politicians on TV news; we hearken back to a 2016 political ad in which President Donald Trump talks about the wall he wants to build between the U.S. and Mexico; and finally, we link fact-checks from our national partners on the president’s speech in Phoenix, Arizona.

Trump eclipses sun (at least on TV news)

The total eclipse of the sun that was viewable coast to coast in the U.S. was big news this week–but not big enough to merit more mentions than President Donald Trump. The chart below illustrates how much coverage major cable news stations gave over a 24-hour period starting August 21 for the president and congressional leaders versus the solar eclipse. In every case, Trump got more air time than the celestial event; among congressional leaders, only House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., beat the sun, and then only on CNN (and that’s because CNN ran coverage of a town hall meeting he hosted that day). Of course, cable news shows, by their very nature, devote more time to politics than they do to science, and congressional leaders don’t have the public profile a sitting president does; nevertheless, here’s an example of how our TV news diet continues to be dominated by the president.

Source: Television News Explorer, fueled by TV News Archive closed captioning. Represents percent of sentence mentions devoted to Trump and congressional leaders vs. eclipse/sun over 24-hour period.

Trump on the wall

On August 22, at a rally in Phoenix, Trump raised the stakes on building his promised border wall between the U.S. and Mexico by threatening a government shut down over the issue: “[W]e are building a wall on the southern border, which is absolutely necessary…. [T]he obstructionist Democrats would like us not to do it, but believe me, we have to close down that government. We’re building that wall.”

Trump is keenly aware of his campaign promise that he would build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico; for example, the political nature of his promise–and that Mexico would pay for it–was a key theme of his phone conversation with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto following the election.

In January 2016, Trump’s campaign ran the following ad more than 1,400 times in key TV markets reaching voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to data analyzed by the TV News Archive’s Political Ad Archive. Interestingly, in the ad he talks about the wall–but not the promise to pay:

“I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message. We are going to take our country and we’re going to fix it, we’re going to make it great again. We are going to fix our health. We are going to take care of our vets. We are going to fix our military. We are going to strengthen our borders, we’re going to build the wall, but we are going to strengthen our borders, we are going to make it great again, we’re going to make it greater than ever before, thank you.”

Fact-checks: The Phoenix rally

During the rally in Phoenix, Trump made many factual assertions that PolitiFact and FactCheck.org found wanting. (View the full rally here on the TV News Archive.) Among them: the president’s claim that “There aren’t too many people outside protesting,” which PolitiFact reporter Miriam Valverde rated as “false”:

“Thousands of people were out on the streets of Phoenix protesting Trump’s speech, according to multiple media accounts and the Phoenix police chief, who said the city’s downtown had “tens of thousands” of people exercising their right to free speech….Trump significantly underestimated crowds in Phoenix.”

To receive the TV News Archive’s email newsletter, subscribe here.

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The Battle to Save Net Neutrality – Please Join Us

Posted on August 22, 2017 by Katie Barrett

Net Neutrality

Net neutrality, the principle that broadband companies like Comcast and AT&T shouldn’t pick winners and losers on the Internet, is under attack in Washington, DC. The Trump Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing to repeal the strong 2015 net neutrality rules, which are overwhelmingly popular with Americans all across the country, regardless of political affiliation. At the same time, some members of Congress are pushing to put a weaker form of net neutrality into law and at the same time free broadband companies from FCC oversight.

Mozilla and the Internet Archive will host a discussion featuring former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler; Representative Ro Khanna; Mozilla Chief Legal and Business Officer Denelle Dixon; Amy Aniobi, Supervising Producer, Insecure (HBO); Luisa Leschin, Co-Executive Producer/Head Writer, Just Add Magic (Amazon); and Malkia Cyril, Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice. The panel will be moderated by Gigi Sohn, Mozilla Fellow and former Counselor to Chairman Wheeler, and will discuss how net neutrality promotes democratic values, social justice and economic opportunity, what the current threats are, and what the public can do to preserve it.

Doors open at 6:00pm. A reception will precede the discussion from 6:30-7:15, and the discussion (followed by audience Q&A) will run from 7:30-9:00.

Please RSVP here.

What: The Battle to Save Net Neutrality

When: Monday, September 18th, 2017
6:30pm Reception
7:30 pm Discussion & Q&A

Where: Internet Archive Headquarters
300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118

Posted in Announcements, Event, News | 3 Comments