Tag Archives: Barack Obama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Top-rated Fox News shows.

Top-rated MSNBC news shows.

Top-rated CNN shows.

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

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

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

Methodological notes

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

President & current congressional leaders

President Donald Trump, 7/13/17

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

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

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

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

Former living presidents and recent major party presidential candidates*

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

George W. Bush, 11/1/17

Jimmy Carter, 10/21/17

Bill Clinton, 9/12/17

Hillary Clinton, 9/12/17

Barack Obama, 7/13/17

Mitt Romney, 10/4/17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Past State of the Union addresses

2016: Barack Obama

2015: Barack Obama

2014: Barack Obama

2013: Barack Obama

2012: Barack Obama

2011: Barack Obama

2010: Barack Obama

1995: Bill Clinton

1988: Ronald Reagan (no closed captioning)

1980: Jimmy Carter  (no closed captioning)

1975:  Gerald Ford

1969: Lyndon Johnson

1965: Lyndon Johnson

1963: John F. Kennedy (no closed captioning)

1961: John F. Kennedy (no closed captioning)

1942: Franklin D. Roosevelt (no closed captioning)

TV News Record: Whoops, they said it again (on taxes)

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

This week, we demonstrate GOP and Democrat talking points on taxes; display a case of mistaken facial identity; and present fact checks on the GOP tax proposal.

Whoops, they said it again

Was that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., who said “tax cuts for the rich”? Or was that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D., N.Y.? Wait: they both said it. Often.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., keeps talking about tax reform being a “once in a generation opportunity,” and, coincidence!, so does Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky. It’s a recurring theme.

These types of repeated phrases, often vetted via communication staff, are known as “talking points,” and it’s the way politicians, lobbyists, and other denizens of the nation’s capital sell policy. The TV News Archive is working toward the goal of applying artificial intelligence (AI) to our free, online library of TV news to help ferret out talking points so we can better understand how political messages are crafted and disseminated.

For now, we don’t have an automated way to identify such repeated phrases from the thousands of hours of television news coverage. However, searching within our curated archives of top political leaders can provide a quick way to check for a phrase you think you’re hearing often. Visit archive.org/tv to find our Trump archive, executive branch archive, and congressional archives, click into an archive, then search for the phrase within that archive.

Sample search results in the congressional archive

Funny, you look familiar

Wait, is this former President George W. Bush trying out a new look?

No, it’s not. This is Bob Massi, a legal analyst for Fox Business News and host of “Bob Massi is the Property Man.”  In a test run of new faces for our Face-o-Matic facial detection tool, Massi’s uncanny resemblance (minus the hair) to the former president earned him a “false positive” – the algorithm identified this appearance as Bush incorrectly.

This doesn’t get us too worried, as we still include human testers and editors in our secret sauce: we’ll retrain our algorithm to disregard photos of Massi in the TV news stream. It does point toward why we want to be very careful, particularly with facial recognition, where a private individual may be tracked inadvertently or a public official misrepresented. Our concern about developing ethical practices with facial recognition is why, for the present, we are restricting our face-finding to elected officials. We invite discussion with the greater community about ethical practices in applying AI to the TV News Archive at tvnews@archive.org.

In our current Face-o-Matic set we track the faces of President Donald Trump and the four congressional leaders in their TV news appearances. After receiving feedback from journalists and researchers, our next set will include living ex-presidents and recent major presidential party nominees: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush,  Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Stay tuned, while we fine tune our model.

Fact-check: everyone will get a tax cut (false)

In an interview on November 7, on Fox News’s new “The Ingraham Angle,” House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., says: “Everyone enjoys a tax cut all across the board.”

Pulling in information from the Tax Policy Center and a tax model created by the American Enterprise Institute, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler counters Ryan’s claim: “In the case of married families with children — whom Republicans are assiduously wooing as beneficiaries of their plan — about 40 percent are estimated to receive tax hikes by 2027, even if the provisions are retained.”

Ryan changed his language, according to Kessler, following an inquiry on November 8 from the Fact Checker. Now he is saying, “the average taxpayer in all income levels gets a tax cut.”

Fact-check: tax bill not being scored by CBO as is tradition (false)

In an interview on November 12 on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D., Ill., claimed that the GOP tax plan is “not being scored by the Congressional Budget Office, as it is traditionally. It’s because it doesn’t add up.”

“Under the most obvious interpretation of that statement, Durbin is incorrect. The nonpartisan analysis for tax bills is actually a task handled by the Joint Committee on Taxation, and the committee has been actively analyzing the Republican tax bills,” reported Louis Jacobson of PolitiFact.

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

By Katie Dahl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

By Katie Dahl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Katie Dahl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Katie Dahl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TV news highlights: wiretaps, Gitmo detainees, and more

By Katie Dahl

Our weekly TV News highlight reel features fact checks by reporters at The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, PolitiFact, and FactCheck.org of President Donald Trump, his spokespeople, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Claim: Obama wiretapped Trump Tower (unsupported)

President Donald Trump took to Twitter this week with an allegation that President Barack Obama tapped his phones during the election. He wrote: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

FactCheck.org’s Eugene Kiely broke down Trump’s claims, the sources he used, and the White House press team’s response, writing “there is no evidence that the FBI wiretapped Trump’s phone or his campaign offices in Trump Tower. Indeed, the director of national intelligence flatly denied it. [hyperlink added]”

Glenn Kessler, reporting for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, wrote that the author of the Heat Street article, the “most important one” of the articles the White House provided as evidence for the president’s claims, now says she “never reported there was wiretap and instead pointed the finger at Breitbart.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, deputy press secretary for the White House, said “[e]verybody acts like President Trump is the one that came up with this idea and just threw it out there… There are multiple news outlets that have reported this.” For PolitiFact, Allison Graves wrote that Huckabee’s defense of the tweets is “False.” Lauren Carroll went further and concluded that “given recent comments from White House spokespeople, it appears more likely that Trump took several media reports about legitimate intelligence investigations into his associates’ possible Russia ties and wove them into a new, unsubstantiated theory that Obama himself did something illegal.”

Claim: Clinton impeached for far less (two Pinocchios)

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., drew a comparison between the circumstances of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment and the disclosures about communications between Attorney General Sessions and the Russian ambassador. “I remind you that this Congress impeached a president for something so far less, having nothing to do with his duties as president of the United States,” she said. Michelle Ye Hee Lee of The Washington Post’s Fact Checker examined the two cases and observed: “If one were to weigh Pelosi’s claim based on whether Sessions and Clinton lied under oath, it’s clear Clinton’s case is not ‘far less’ than Sessions’s. But the content of Clinton’s lies (his sex life) was ‘far less’ important than the content of Sessions’s statements (about potential foreign influence in U.S. elections).”

Claim: Jeff Sessions lied to Congress (unclear)

During Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing in January, Sen. Al Franken, D., Minn., asked “what will you do” if evidence surfaces to support a CNN report that “‘[t]here was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.’” In answering the question, Sessions said “I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians.” Then March 1, The Washington Post reported that Jeff Sessions met with the Russian ambassador twice.

In response to the now confirmed meetings, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted Sessions “lied under oath” and called for his resignation. FactCheck.org’s Robert Farley reported, though, that “legal experts say it would be difficult to prosecute a perjury charge against Sessions, given the ambiguity of the context of his statement.” In defending himself, Sessions said “I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign,” which he argues was the focus of Franken’s question.

Lauren Carroll for PolitiFact similarly reported, “[I]t’s not 100 percent clear that Sessions made an intentionally false statement, though he appears to have omitted relevant information.” One result is that the attorney general has recused himself from “any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.” Louis Jacobson offered additional context in answering “four questions about when senators meet with ambassadors.”

Claim: People go to Planned Parenthood for mammograms (referrals mainly)

Echoed in a statement in a press conference yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D., N.Y.,  claimed in a tweet that “#Trumpcare cuts @PPFA funds, hurting millions of women who turn there for mammograms, maternity care, cancer screenings & more.” Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote that “[m]ammograms have come to symbolize whether Planned Parenthood truly is a health-care organization, as supporters say, or mainly an abortion provider that masquerades as a reproductive health organization, as opponents say.” But, reported Lee, “Planned Parenthood does referrals for mammograms… It does not have mammogram machines at its affiliate clinics.”

Claim: Obama released 122 Gitmo detainees now back on battlefield (mostly false)

A former Guantanamo Bay detainee released under the Obama administration was killed in a U.S. military airstrike in Yemen this month. President Trump reacted on Twitter, writing, “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!” But Robert Farley reported “it’s only nine former detainees. The other 113 were released under President George W. Bush.”

Lauren Carroll weighed in as well, writing “Trump’s claim that the Obama administration released 122 prisoners from Guantanamo that “returned to the battlefield” is right on the numbers but wrong on who is to blame.”

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Due to an editing error now fixed, we inadvertently referred to Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D., Calif., when we meant to refer to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D., N.Y., March 10, 2017.

Preserving U.S. Government Websites and Data as the Obama Term Ends

Long before the 2016 Presidential election cycle librarians have understood this often-overlooked fact: vast amounts of government data and digital information are at risk of vanishing when a presidential term ends and administrations change.  For example, 83% of .gov pdf’s disappeared between 2008 and 2012.

That is why the Internet Archive, along with partners from the Library of Congress, University of North Texas, George Washington University, Stanford University, California Digital Library, and other public and private libraries, are hard at work on the End of Term Web Archive, a wide-ranging effort to preserve the entirety of the federal government web presence, especially the .gov and .mil domains, along with federal websites on other domains and official government social media accounts.

While not the only project the Internet Archive is doing to preserve government websites, ftp sites, and databases at this time, the End of Term Web Archive is a far reaching one.

The Internet Archive is collecting webpages from over 6,000 government domains, over 200,000 hosts, and feeds from around 10,000 official federal social media accounts. The effort is likely to preserve hundreds of millions of individual government webpages and data and could end up totaling well over 100 terabytes of data of archived materials. Over its full history of web archiving, the Internet Archive has preserved over 3.5 billion URLs from the .gov domain including over 45 million PDFs.

This end-of-term collection builds on similar initiatives in 2008 and 2012 by original partners Internet Archive, Library of Congress, University of North Texas, and California Digital Library to document the “gov web,” which has no mandated, domain-wide single custodian. For instance, here is the National Institute of Literacy (NIFL) website in 2008. The domain went offline in 2011. Similarly, the Sustainable Development Indicators (SDI) site was later taken down. Other websites, such as invasivespecies.gov were later folded into larger agency domains. Every web page archived is accessible through the Wayback Machine and past and current End of Term specific collections are full-text searchable through the main End of Term portal. We have also worked with additional partners to provide access to the full data for use in data-mining research and projects.

The project has received considerable press attention this year, with related stories in The New York Times, Politico, The Washington Post, Library Journal, Motherboard, and others.

“No single government entity is responsible for archiving the entire federal government’s web presence,” explained Jefferson Bailey, the Internet Archive’s Director of Web Archiving.  “Web data is already highly ephemeral and websites without a mandated custodian are even more imperiled. These sites include significant amounts of publicly-funded federal research, data, projects, and reporting that may only exist or be published on the web. This is tremendously important historical information. It also creates an amazing opportunity for libraries and archives to join forces and resources and collaborate to archive and provide permanent access to this material.”

This year has also seen a significant increase in citizen and librarian driven “hackathons” and “nomination-a-thons” where subject experts and concerned information professionals crowdsource lists of high-value or endangered websites for the End of Term archiving partners to crawl. Librarian groups in New York City are holding nomination events to make sure important sites are preserved. And universities such as  The University of Toronto are holding events for “guerrilla archiving” focused specifically on preserving climate related data.

We need your help too! You can use the End of Term Nomination Tool to nominate any .gov or government website or social media site and it will be archived by the project team.   If you have other ideas, please comment here or send ideas to info@archive.org.   And you can also help by donating to the Internet Archive to help our continued mission to provide “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”

200 Candles for Abraham Lincoln

Just about 200 years ago, or 10 score as Abraham Lincoln might say, one of the most iconic presidents in history was born. On February 12, 1809, Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks gave birth to a baby boy in a one room cabin. He would grow up to lead the United States and make two of the most well-known speeches in United States history, the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. Now, 200 years later, his country still throws him a birthday party.

President Obama, another tall, elegant man from Illinois who swore into office with his hand on the Lincoln Bible, will be in Springfield on Thursday in the company of $95 ticket holders who are ready for a monumental start to Presidents’ Day Weekend. Although Obama has said, “I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator,” he has looked to Lincoln for help in speech writing and inspiration in leadership. The two have drawn constant comparisons in the press, and one can only wonder how the United States would celebrate Barack Obama’s 200th birthday.

This week, many will celebrate Abe by using the new Lincoln postage stamps, visiting one of the many Lincoln-centered exhibits at museums and libraries, watching the new play about Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, or browsing through the Abraham Lincoln material at Internet Archive.

Here are some highlights from our collections:

  • Abraham Lincoln, a 1930 biographical film directed by D.W. Griffith
  • Gettysburg Address, audio version read by John Greenman
  • Abraham Lincoln, a book of quotes
  • The Face of Lincoln, a short film of a sculptor describing Lincoln’s life while sculpting his bust
  • The Works of Abraham Lincoln Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, Vol. 4,Vol. 5, Vol. 6, Vol. 7
  • Abraham Lincoln: A History
  • The Writings of Abraham Lincoln
  • Happy Birthday, Abe!

    –Cara Binder

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