Tag Archives: Donald Trump

How to Use the Trump Archive to find TV news appearances, fact checks, and share clips

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by Katie Dahl

The experimental Trump Archive, which we launched in January, is a collection of President Donald Trump’s appearances on TV news shows, including interviews, speeches, and press conferences dating back to 2009. Now largely hand-curated, the Trump Archive is a prototype of the type of collection on a public figure or topic possible to make with material from our library of TV news. We are starting to reach out to machine learning collaborators to develop tools to make it more efficient to create such collections, and we have plans to publish similar collections on the Congressional leadership on both sides of the party aisle.

The growing Trump Archive contains a lot of content–928 clips and counting–so we’ve put together some pointers and ideas for how to use the collection. 

Anna Wiener at The New Yorker used the Trump Archive for “immersion therapy: a means of overcoming shock through prolonged exposure,” while the The Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey A. Fowler proposed the Trump Archive could be used to hold politicians accountable by people doing own fact-checking: “At a time when facts are considered up for debate, there’s more value than ever in being able to check the tape yourself.”

Fact-checking in the Trump Archive

The Trump Archive is a great place to spend time if you’re hungry for aggregated fact-checking and added context around President Trump’s statements. We incorporate fact checks from our partners at FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker in a variety of ways.

From this page you can explore TV programs that include at least one fact-checked Trump statement. After choosing a program, look for the fact-checked icon   on the program timeline. When you click on that icon, you’ll be able to watch the video of the statement and then click through to a fact-checking article by one of our partners.

And if you’re eager to look for a specific topic, such as “terrorism,” or “immigration,” this table is a great place to start. You can search for a topic using the trusty find function on your computer, or download the table and view the list as a spreadsheet. Find a list of topics at PolitiFact and FactCheck.org.

Search the Trump Archive

The search function, on the left side of the screen on the front page of the Trump Archive, allows you to find words or phrases within the closed captioning for a particular clip. Since those transcribers are working in real-time and at lightening speed, the captions don’t produce a perfect transcript, but they will get you really close to where you need to be.

For example, I searched for “believe me” in the Trump Archive and came up with hundreds of results. While that particular example may only be useful for artists and linguists, the functionality can be applied in many ways. For example, there are almost 200 results for a search of “Iran Deal,” 70+ results for “radical Islamic terrorists,” and when you search “jobs,” the results almost match the number in our total collection, revealing how often Donald Trump talks about jobs.

When we heard the President would be taking action to remove an expansion of rights for the transgender community, we looked for what he may have said about it before by searching “transgender” in the caption search. It yielded six programs in which he spoke publicly about it.

Because of the imperfect nature of closed captioning transcripts, your search is often more successful if you don’t try for an exact quote. For example, you may know Trump said something like “we can make the kind of change together that you dream of.” The closed captioning quote may actually be “an make the find a change together that you beam of.” But in those circumstances where you need to search for an exact quote, try using this, ~0. For example, “the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe”~0  . The ~0 tells the search box to look for all these words without any other words in between them, thus next to each other.

Browse the Trump Archive by TV show

If you know the program name of the Trump statement you’re looking for, you can use the “Topics & Subjects” filter on the left side navigation. So for instance, you may recall that Trump said something you want to find on an episode of 60 Minutes. Find Topics & Subjects on the left side of the page and click on “More.”

Then check the boxes of the relevant program(s), in this case, 60 Minutes. Hit “apply your filters,” and then browse all the 60 Minutes programs in the Trump Archive.

Make your own shareable TV clips

Once you find that video clip where Trump says something you want to share, you can make your own video clip of up to three minutes that can be easily embedded into a post. If you post the link on twitter, the clip appears within the body of the tweet and can be played without clicking through to the TV News Archive.

To start, click on the icon to “Share, embed or refine this clip!” 

A window will then open up to present (highlighted in orange) the closed captioning of the 60-second pre-defined segment—and the captioning of the 60 seconds before and after (not highlighted) for context. Important: the captions come from real-time closed captioning, which means they are often incomplete, garbled and not precisely aligned. This is all still an experiment, remember. Be sure to watch your clip before you post to make sure you captured what you meant to.

“Grab” the quote marks at the beginning and end of the highlighted segment and through a bit of trial and error, find the right in and out points for the clip. Note that each time the quote marks move, the player starts to play and the URL changes to update the “start” and “end” points of the clip — named to reflect the number of seconds into the entire program. Remember: Watch your clip before you post.

Pro tip: If you clip a quote that’s fewer than 10 seconds it might not play, so give it a bit of time to run. Copy the URL and paste it elsewhere. Click one of the variety of share method icons on the bottom of the edit window (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) The embed icon </> will offer two flavors of embed codes for the portion you have selected—one for an iFrame, the other for many WordPress sites.

Fun, right? Now go share another. Let us know if you have any questions by emailing us at politicalad@archive.org; and please, do share what uses you find for the Trump Archive.

 

 

TV news highlights with fact checks

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By Nancy Watzman and Katie Dahl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claim: something happened in Sweden. (Not exactly)

By far the quote that received the most attention from the president’s rally were his comments about Sweden: “We’ve got to keep our country safe … You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden… Sweden? Who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This week’s TV news highlights with fact checks

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by Katie Dahl

As part of a new regular feature, the Internet Archive presents highlights from our national fact checking partners of TV news segments aired over the past week. These include President Donald Trump’s assertion that the number of police officers killed on the beat has increased; his latest attack on the press; his claim that sanctuary cities breed crime; the proposition that Nordstrom’s decision to drop Ivanka Trump’s apparel line was political;  several Trump statements from his Super Bowl interview with O’Reilly, and background on the silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D., Mass., on the floor of the Senate. 

Claim: Number of officers shot and killed in line of duty increased (true)

Trump earned a rare “Gepetto’s checkmark” for truthfulness from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker when he told a gathering of law enforcement that, “The number of officers shot and killed in the line of duty last year increased by 56 percent from the year before.” Reporter Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote, “Trump’s grim statistic seemed too remarkable to be correct:…But the figure is solid. Last year was a notable year in police deaths, largely because of the number of police officers who were fatally shot in ambush attacks across the country.”

Claim: press doesn’t want to report on terrorism (wrong)From our Trump Archive: in describing “radical islamic terrorist” attacks around the world, President Trump claimed the “very very dishonest press doesn’t want to report” them. The fact-checkers at PolitiFact found no evidence for this assertion, rating the claim as “Pants on Fire”: “The media may sometimes be cautious about assigning religious motivation to a terrorist attack when the facts are unclear or still being investigated. But that’s not the same as covering them up through lack of coverage.” Reporters at FactCheck.org called Trump’s claim “nonsense.”

Claim: Sanctuary cities breed crime (no evidence)

Also from the Trump Archive: in an interview on FOX News, host Bill O’Reilly asked for Trump’s reaction to news that officials in California are discussing whether to become a sanctuary state. Trump responded that he is opposed to sanctuary cities, saying they “breed crime.” PolitiFact reporter Allison Graves wrote that there isn’t much research on the impact of sanctuary cities on crime, but that at least one recent study shows no effect on crime rates. Michelle Ye Hee Lee gave the claim “three Pinocchios” from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker: “Trump goes too far declaring that the cities “breed crime.” He not only makes a correlation, but also ascribes a causation, without facts to support either.”

 

Claim: Putin’s a killer (experts say yes)

In the Super Bowl interview, O’Reilly pressed President Trump about his respect for Putin, saying “Putin’s a killer.” Trump’s response was “We got a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?” PolitiFact’s Graves reported on O’Reilly’s assertion that Putin is a killer, writing that “the political climate in Russia is responsible for a sizable amount of journalists murders in the country…. Many of the perpetrators are thought to be government and military officials and political groups.”

Claim: Three million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in November elections (no evidence)

Trump continued his unsubstantiated claim that three million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the November election. When pushed on the need for evidence, Trump was undeterred, saying “[m]any people have come out and said I’m right. You know that.” PolitiFact repeated its finding that there is no evidence for this kind of voter fraud: “Trump’s claim is undermined by years of publically available information such as a report that found just 56 cases of noncitizens voting between 2000 and 2011.”

Claim: Nordstrom’s decision to drop Ivanka Trump’s apparel line was political (No evidence)

After Nordstrom dropped his daughter Ivanka Trump’s apparel line, President Trump attacked the decision as political. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, followed at a news conference saying, “[T]his is a direct attack on his policies and her name.” Reporting for The Washington Post Fact Checker, Lee cited an internal company email from November 2016, which states the company would continue to sell the brand as long as it was profitable. Then on February 2, Nordstrom announced it was dropping the line, because of “poor sales.” Lee gave the claim “four Pinocchios.”

Explainer: what is “Senate rule XIX” (rarely invoked)

During a Senate floor debate about the nomination of then Sen. Jeff Sessions, R., Ala., to be attorney general, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., silenced Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D., Mass., as she read from a letter by Corretta Scott King. In doing so, he cited an obscure rule, known as Senate rule XIX, which reads: “[N]o Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” PolitiFact reporter Louis Jacobson provided a useful primer on the rule, including statistics on how often it’s been invoked in Senate history: most likely, only twice, once in 1915 and another tie in 1952.

Katie Dahl is a research associate with the TV New Archive.

In the news: Trump Archive, end-of-term preservation, & link rot

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News outlets have been getting the word out on Internet Archive efforts to preserve President-elect Donald Trump’s statements; the outgoing Obama Administration’s web page and government data; as well as preventing that nasty experience of encountering a “404” when you click on a link online, aka “link rot.”

Trump Archive 

A number of journalists have been exploring the riches contained within the newly launched Trump Archive, a TV news clips of the president-elect speaking peppered with links to more than 500 fact checks by national fact-checking groups.

Annie Wiener, writing for The New Yorker, immerses herself in Trump statements and discovers 56 mentions of the escalator in Trump tower, and that Trump:

“is a fan of the word “sleaze,” and of the phrase “tough cookie,” which he has used to describe policemen, his opponents’ political donors, Paul LePage, “real-estate guys in New York and elsewhere,” an unnamed friend who is a “great financial guy,” isis, three professional football players, Reince Priebus, Lyndon Johnson, and Trump’s father, Fred. After watching long stretches of video, she writes, “It occurred to me that spending time online in the Trump Archive could be a form of immersion therapy: a means of overcoming shock through prolonged exposure.”

Geoffrey Fowler, tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal, bemoans the lack of easy-to-use tech tools to help people be responsible citizens overall, but also notes the promise–and challenge–of a curated collection like the Trump Archive:

“The Trump Archive shows what’s hard about using tech to hold officials accountable. It’s assembled and hand-curated by humans. Yet even using the transcripts, it can be hard to tell the difference between a spoken name and a person who’s actually speaking. Archive officials say making their database applicable to hundreds or thousands more politicians would require help from tech firms with capabilities in machine learning and voice and facial recognition.”

Fowler also published this video, featuring plenty of Trump, an interview with Roger Macdonald, director of the TV News Archive; and ample footage of the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters.

The Trump Archive also was featured in Marketplace Tech®, The Hill, Forbes, Newsweek, Buzzfeed News,  TechPlz, VentureBeat, engadget, and more.

Preserving Obama Administration websites, social media

The Internet Archive’s efforts to help preserve government websites via the Wayback Machine during and after the transition has continued to garner attention. Wired reports on a group of climate scientists working against the clock to archive government websites related to global warming:

One half was setting web crawlers upon NOAA web pages that could be easily copied and sent to the Internet Archive. The other was working their way through the harder-to-crack data sets—the ones that fuel pages like the EPA’s incredibly detailed interactive map of greenhouse gas emissions, zoomable down to each high-emitting factory and power plant.

The New Scientist also writes on efforts to archive climate data:

Fears that data could be misused or altered have prompted crowd-sourcing to back up federal climate and environmental data, including Climate Mirror, a distributed volunteer effort supported by the Internet Archive and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto.

The Los Angeles Times and Quartz offer reports on archiving climate data.

Internet Archive works against link rot

Tech publications were quick to inform their readers about the Internet Archive’s new chrome extension that fights link rot by directing users to archived web pages. Here is Mashable:

Now Internet Archive has built a Wayback Machine Chrome extension. It works like this: If you click on a link that would normally lead to an error page (think 404), the extension will instead give users the option to load an archived version of the page. The link is no longer simply gone.

Also writing on the fight against link rot: NetworkWorld, Venture Beat, The Tech Portal, Bleeping Computer, and ZDNet.

 

 

 

See Trump Archive fact checks in one place

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Robin Chin, Katie Dahl, Tracey Jaquith, Roger Macdonald, Nancy Watzman, and Dan Schultz are contributing research and engineering for the Trump Archive. 

Now it’s easier to find fact checks of specific statements by President-elect Donald Trump in our new Trump Archive, an experimental collection of TV news clips featuring Trump–including fact checks of his press conference on January 11, his first since July 2016.

We’ve got 500+ fact checks by FactCheck.org, the Pulitzer-prize winning PolitiFact, and The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker embedded within the Trump Archive; these are now viewable on this dedicated page, with the option of downloading a csv containing links to fact checks, links to TV news clips, date of airing, and topics covered.

The Internet Archive’s Trump Archive launched on January 5 with 700+ televised speeches, interviews, debates, and other news broadcasts related to President-elect Donald Trump, and it continues to grow.

We created the Trump Archive in response to journalists and scholars who had trouble finding clips of Trump speaking through the caption search function in our TV News Archive library. We are hand-curating this collection as an experimental prototype for learning how to engineer solutions so similar archives can be created–whether by the Internet Archive or members of the public–about other elected officials and topics of interest. We are looking for collaborative partners to explore artificial intelligence approaches to creating such collections, with an ease and scale far beyond what can be accomplished now by hand.

The list of fact checks in the Trump Archive includes claims made by Trump during his press conference on January 11 covering issues from health care to ISIS to Trump’s connections to Russia. Here’s a sampling.

Health care

Trump said: “Obamacare is a complete and total disaster. It’s imploding as we said. Some states have over 100 percent increase.”

FactCheck.org: “Only Arizona has an average increase that high, and 84 percent with marketplace coverage in 2016 received tax credits to purchase insurance.”

PolitiFact: “While the average premium increase in Arizona rose by 145 percent in 2017, it is the only state with a triple-digit increase. Alabama saw the second highest increase, 71 percent. On the other end, a few states saw decreases. The average premium increase across all states was 25 percent.”

The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker: “Trump exaggerates here, and appears to misunderstand a fundamental part of the Affordable Care Act. State-by-state weighted average increases range from just 1.3 percent in Rhode Island to as high as 71 percent in Oklahoma. But the most common plans in the marketplace in 2017 experienced an average increase of 22 percent. These plans have been used as the benchmark to calculate government subsidies.”

ISIS

Trump: “I mean if you look, this administration created ISIS by leaving at the wrong time. The void was created, ISIS was formed.”

FactCheck.org: “Trump continues to oversimplify the situation by placing the entirety of the blame for the creation of ISIS on Obama’s decision to withdraw troops from Iraq.”

PolitiFact: “This is a more tempered version of Trump’s previous Pants on Fire claim that Obama and Clinton “founded ISIS.” Experts told PolitiFact that you can reasonably criticize the Obama administration’s withdrawal from Iraq, lack of support to anti-Assad rebels in Syria, and intervention in Libya for contributing to the power of ISIS. But the timeline was set in motion by the Bush administration.”

The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker: “Trump greatly simplifies a complex situation.”

Russia

Trump: “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia.”  

PolitiFact:  “It’s true that Trump has yet to build a hotel or tower in Russia, but he has eyed the Moscow skyline for decades.

We don’t know for sure about the extent of Trump’s business dealings in Russia, because he hasn’t released his tax returns. But his son, Donald Trump Jr., said in a 2008 real estate conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

We do know that Trump agreed to host the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013, a $20 million deal facilitated by a Russian real estate mogul and billionaire Aras Agalarov. (Trump also cameoed in Agalarov’s son’s dance-pop music video). He also made millions selling a 17-bedroom Florida mansion to a Russian billionaire.

The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker: “Trump is being misleading when he says he has stayed away from Russia. Trump repeatedly sought deals in Russia. In 1987, he went to Moscow to find a site for luxury hotel; no deal emerged. In 1996, he sought to build a condominium complex in Russia; that also did not succeed. In 2005, Trump signed a one-year deal with a New York development company to explore a Trump Tower in Moscow, but the effort fizzled.

In a 2008 speech, Donald Trump Jr. made it clear that the Trumps want to do business in Russia, but were finding it difficult. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son said at a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Internet Archive’s Trump Archive launches today

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The Trump Archive launches today with 700+ televised speeches, interviews, debates, and other news broadcasts related to President-elect Donald Trump, created using the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive.

A work in progress, the growing collection now includes more than 520 hours of Trump video. The earliest excerpt dates from December 2009, and the collection continues through the present. It includes more than 500 video statements fact checked by FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker covering such controversial topics as immigration, Trump’s tax returns, Hillary Clinton’s emails, and health care.

Full list of fact checks with links to video statements in TV News Archive.

Visit the Trump Archive.

Reporters, researchers, Wikipedians, and the general public are invited to quote, compare and contrast televised statements made by Trump.

  • Use clips in your articles and videos.
  • Create supercuts on topics like Trump’s perspectives of the US press, made with our online “Popcorn” video editor.  
  • Let us know what content we are missing.  
  • If you have the technical resources, help us enhance search and discovery by collaborating in experiments to apply artificial intelligence-driven facial recognition, voice identification, and other video content analysis approaches.
  • How would you like to use such an archive?  Comment below, or write us info@archive.org

Why a Trump Archive?

We draw on this material, and our experience with building the successful Political TV Ad Archive, to create a curated collection of material related to Trump, with an emphasis on fact-checked statements. The video is searchable, quotable, and shareable on social media.

In response to requests by our fact checking partners on the Political TV Ad Archive project and other media, we hope to provide assistance for those tracking Trump’s evolving statements on public policy issues.

For example: in July 2016, Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “I have no relationship with Putin…I don’t think I’ve ever met him.” Stephanopoulos pressed him on this point during the interview, saying that Trump had previously claimed a relationship with him. PolitiFact ruled this statement by Trump as a “full flip flop”: “Trump’s denial of a relationship with Putin contradicted what he had said on multiple previous occasions.”

By providing a free and enduring source for TV news broadcasts of Trump’s statements, the Internet Archive hopes to make it more efficient for the media, researchers, and the public to track Trump’s statements while fact-checking and reporting on the new administration. The Trump Archive can also serve as a rich treasure trove of video material for any creative use: comedy, art, documentaries, wherever people’s inspiration takes them.

We consider the Trump Archive to be an experimental model for creating similar archives for other public officials. For example, we’ll explore the idea of creating curated collections for Trump’s nominees to head federal agencies; members of Congress of both parties (for example, perhaps the Senate and House majority and minority leadership); Supreme Court nominees, and so on.

While we’ve largely hand-curated this collection, we hope to collaborate with researchers to apply machine intelligence to expand this collection, building others and making search of our entire TV library vastly more efficient.

Such experimentation builds on our experience with first prototyping and then developing the the Political TV Ad Archive. Our first collection of political TV ads, covering ads aired in Philadelphia during the 2014 mid-term elections, was built largely by hand. However, in preparation for the Political TV Ad Archive, we created a new open source tool, the Duplitron, that was able to identify ad airings by deploying audio fingerprinting. During the course of the project, we collected nearly 3,000 ads and documented more than 364,000 ad airings.

Why now?

Just because something is broadcast or posted on the internet doesn’t mean it’s forever. Reporters and the public may take it for granted that a news story or a piece of broadcast video is only a google search away, but as newspapers, companies, and organizations fail and change, often vital information is lost. The web is far more fragile than is generally understood.

The Internet Archive’s core mission is to preserve and make accessible our cultural heritage. For example, the Wayback Machine preserves websites over time, so if pages or sites are deleted, they can still be found. For example, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reported on how the president-elect had deleted a web page from the official transition website that had touted Trump properties.

We also preserve political and news content through the TV News Archive, which contains news broadcasts by major networks back to 2009, searchable via closed captioning. The Political TV Ad Archive archives 2016 election ads along with relevant fact checks and follow-the-money reporting by our journalism partners. Our Political Campaign web archive is preserving election-related online media, such as select candidate and political groups’ websites and Twitter and Instagram feeds.

What’s next

The Trump Archive is a work in progress; we will continue to refine the content. We hope to work with others to broaden the materials available, to make search more efficient, and otherwise make it more useful for the public. We’d like you feedback and suggestions.

The great American author William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We believe that the Trump Archive, in preserving the past, can help the public engage more knowledgeably with our future.

Many thanks to the thoughtful contributions of Robin Chin, Jessica Clark, Katie Dahl, Katie Donnelly, John Gonzalez, Wendy Hanamura, Tracey Jaquith, Jeff Kaplan, Roger Macdonald, Ralf Muehlen, Craig Newmark, Sylvia Paull, Alexis Rossi, Dan Schultz, Nancy Watzman, our Partners & Funders and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive – on whose shoulders we stand.

How the Internet Archive is hacking the election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Wayback Machine captures Melania Trump’s deleted internet bio

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Melania Trump’s personal website is now gone from the internet — but is preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine — after a Huffington Post reporter and other news outlets began questioning elements of the would-be First Lady’s biography.

Yesterday Christina Wilkie, a national political reporter for the Huffington Post, published a story noting that Melania Trump’s elaborate website, www.melaniatrump.com, which existed as recently as July 20, now redirects to the Trump Organization’s official website. The removal of the website followed questions about a biography that appeared on it, that claimed  that Melania Trump had “earned a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia.”

Many media outlets have followed suit, writing that the website has now disappeared.

Today Melania Trump tweeted that the website was taken down because  “it does not accurately reflect my current and professional interests.”

Screenshot 2016-07-28 13.13.40

 

Wilkie and other reporters had questioned whether Trump truly obtained those degrees from the university. The inquiries took on new potency after she was accused of possible plagiarism in her speech before the Republican National Convention last week. The campaign has not answered questions about the biography. Snopes.com has reported that there is no “University of Slovenia.”

Meanwhile, Melania’s original biography is preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which crawls websites to create a historical archive. The most recent snapshot was taken on July 20 — see the screenshot below.

Screenshot 2016-07-28 13.00.56

 

The Political TV Ad Archive is tracking and archiving political ads in the 2016 elections. In addition, we’ve set up a special Archive-It collection to track candidates’ and political organizations’ social media websites here, with more 320 million captures to date.

Cross posted on the Political TV Ad Archive. July 29: quote from Melania Trump’s defunct website corrected.

Is it 1968? Not really — but past convention video clips show controversy

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Research by Robin Chin

Is it 1968? Many pundits have been asking this question in recent days, in the lead up to what is expected to be a contentious–and some worry about violent–GOP convention in Cleveland, where Donald Trump is expected to accept the GOP nomination. A spate of mass gun killings, the death of two African American men in recent weeks at the hands of police, the murder of five police officers by a sniper during a demonstration and then three more by a lone gun man in Baton Rouge, terrorism here and abroad, involvement overseas in intractable conflicts, growing economic inequality — none of these developments quite parallel the tumultuous events of the 1960s. But the situation was volatile then, and it’s volatile now.

To set the scene, thanks to the TV News Archive, the Internet Archive‘s online free library of TV news clips, revisiting some of the more “crazy” conventions of years past (headline by Politico), or simply notable or controversial moments, is just a search away. All of these clips are editable, embeddable, and shareable on social media.

Chicago, 1968

When the Democrats met in Chicago in 1968, it was in the shadow of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Democratic primary candidate Robert Kennedy. Vice President Hubert Humphrey had the support of the some 60 percent of the delegates, largely local party leaders — people who would be super delegates today. While a liberal, Humphrey’s support of the war as Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president made him unpopular in the anti-war movement.

As described by Politico, “With Humphrey’s nomination all but certain, protesters associated with the Youth International Party (the Yippies) and National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the MOBE) took to the streets outside Chicago’s convention hall; inside, city policemen allied with the local political machine roughed up liberal delegates and journalists in plain view of news cameras. “I wasn’t sentenced and sent here!” a prominent New York Democrat bellowed as a uniformed officer dragged him off the floor. “I was elected!”

The clip below, from the CNN documentary series, “The Sixties,” shows police beating up protestors on the streets. A special commission appointed to investigate the protests characterized the violent events as a “police riot” directed at protesters and recommended prosecution of police who used indiscriminate violence.

That same night, Humphrey took to the podium to accept the nomination. He referred the violence outside when he said, “[O]ne cannot help but reflect, the deep sadness that we feel over the troubles and the violence which have erupted regrettably and tragically in the streets of this great city and for the personal injuries that have occurred. Surely we have now learned the lesson that violence breeds counter violence and it cannot be condoned whatever the source.”

San Francisco, 1964

In 1964, GOP moderates Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney, then governor of Michigan, led an unsuccessful campaign against conservative insurgent Barry Goldwater, at a convention Goldwater biographer Robert Alan Goldberg later dubbed the “Woodstock of the right.” (Romney was former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s father.) Goldwater was a fierce opponent of the Civil Rights Act and strong supporter of military intervention against the Soviet Union.

Some have compared him to Trump because of his belligerence and unpopularity with the establishment Republicans. For example, like Trump, he was not one to mince words about his enemies. At the convention, when asked by a reporter about LBJ and the Civil Rights Act, he replied, “He’s the phoniest individual who ever came around.”

The convention was raucous, filled with delegates booing the moderates — as when Rockefeller called on the crowd to reject extremists. But the moment most remembered was when Goldwater took the podium to accept the nomination, when, to enormous applause, he said:

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. [applause] And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Goldwater went on to lose the election, badly, to Lyndon B. Johnson.

Other historic moments

The TV News Archive is full of many other convention speech clips of moments that turned history’s tide. Here, for example, is John F. Kennedy, accepting the Democratic nomination in 1960, stating that voters should not “throw away” their vote because of concern about his religious affiliation. He went on to become the first Catholic president of the United States.

And here is Richard Nixon, in his 1968 nomination speech, talking about the increase in crime and criticizing those who say “law and order” was code for racism. He was speaking to the charged issues surrounding race and policing at the time:

“Time is running out for the merchants of corruption…and to those who say law and order is a code word for racism there and here is the reply. Our goal is justice for every American. If we are to have respect for law in America we must have laws that deserve respect.”

Nixon’s words, however, have a doubly ironic ring today. First, because the debate over policing in the African American community stubbornly persists decades later. And second, because of his own role in covering up the Watergate scandal, which involved dirty tricks against the Democrats during the 1972 campaign. Nixon would eventually resign from the presidency in 1974. Three years later, in 1977, the journalist David Frost asked Nixon under what circumstances a president can do something illegal. Nixon’s famous answer: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

For those wanting to plumb the riches of past convention speeches, below is a list, with links, of most major convention speeches by nominees, starting with Harry Truman in 1948 and going to Barack Obama in 2012. The speeches were broadcast on C-Span.

1948: Harry Truman acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, PA Part 1.

Harry Truman acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, PA Part 2.

1952: Adlai Stevenson acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in Chicago, IL Part 1.

Adlai Stevenson acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in Chicago, IL Part 2.

1956: Republican Convention and Eisenhower’s nomination  Universal newsreel.

Dwight D. Eisenhower acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Daly City, CA Part 1.

Dwight D. Eisenhower acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Daly City, CA Part 2.

1960: John F. Kennedy acceptance speech at 1960 Democratic National Conventions in Los Angeles, CA Part 1.

John F. Kennedy acceptance speech at 1960 Democratic National Conventions in Los Angeles, CA Part 2.

Former President Hebert Hoover speech at Republican National Convention Chicago, IL.

Henry Cabot Lodge VP acceptance speech at  National Convention Chicago, IL.

1964: Barry Goldwater acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Daly City, CA.

Robert Kennedy speech at Democratic National Convention Atlantic City, NJ.

Lyndon Johnson acceptance speech Atlantic City, NJ Part 1.

Lyndon Johnson acceptance speech Atlantic City, NJ Part 2.

1968: Spiro Agnew VP acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, FL.

Richard Nixon acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Miami Beach, FL.

Hubert Humphrey acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Chicago, Il  NBC News.

1972: McGovern acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Miami Beach, FL Part 1.

McGovern acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Miami Beach, FL Part 2.

Richard Nixon acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Miami Beach, FL.

Richard Nixon acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Miami Beach, Florida NBC News.

1976: Barbara Jordan keynote speech at Democratic Convention New York, NY.

Jimmy Carter acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention New York, NY Part 1.

Jimmy Carter acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention New York, NY Part 2.

August 17, 1976 Republic National Convention Kansas City, MO delegates debating Ronald Reagan rule requiring Ford to name VP before they vote  CBS News Part 1.

August 17, 976 Republic National Convention Kansas City, MO includes delegates debating Ronald Reagan rule C16 requiring Ford to name VP before they vote  CBS News Part 2.

Gerald Ford acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Kansas City, MO Part 1.

Gerald Ford acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Kansas City, MO Part 2.

Ronald Reagan endorsement speech of Gerald Ford as Presidential Nominee at Republican National Convention Kansas City, MO.

1980: Ronald Reagan acceptance speech  at the Republican National Convention Detroit, MI.

Ted Kennedy speech at Democratic National Convention in New York. Kennedy was a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Jimmy Carter acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in New York, NY Part 1.

Jimmy Carter acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in New York, NY Part 2.

1984: Geraldine Ferraro VP acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention San Francisco, CA.

Walter Mondale acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention San Francisco, CA Part 1.

Walter Mondale acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention San Francisco, CA Part 2.

Ronald Reagan acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Dallas, TX.

Mario Cuomo keynote speech at Democratic National Convention San Franciso, CA.

1988: Ann Richards keynote speech at Democratic National Convention Atlanta, GA.

Michael Dukakis acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Atlanta, GA Part 1.

Michael Dukakis acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Atlanta, GA Part 2.

Dan Quayle VP acceptance speech at Republican National Convention New Orleans, LA.

George H.W. Bush acceptance speech at Republican National Convention New Orleans, LA.

1992: Barbara Jordan speech at Democratic National Convention New York, NY.

Al Gore VP acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention New York, NY.

Bill Clinton acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention New York, NY.

Pat Buchanan Keynote speech at Republican National Convention Houston, TX.

Ronald Reagan speech at Republican National Convention  Houston, TX Part 1.

Ronald Reagan speech at Republican National Convention  Houston, TX Part 2.

George H. W. Bush acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Houston, TX.

1996: Jack Kemp VP acceptance speech at Republican National Convention San Diego, CA.

Bob Dole acceptance speech at Republican National Convention San Diego, CA.

Hillary Clinton speech at the Democratic National Convention Chicago, IL.

Bill Clinton acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention Chicago, IL. (Currently not available on the TV News Archive.)

2000: Dick Cheney VP 2000 acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, PA.

George W. Bush acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, PA Part 1.

George W. Bush acceptance speech at Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, PA Part 2.

Al Gore acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, CA.

2004: Barack Obama keynote speech at Democratic National Convention Boston, MA. (Currently not available on the TV News Archive.)

2004 John Edwards speech at Democratic National Convention  Boston, MA.

John Kerry acceptance speech at  Democratic National Convention  Boston, MA.

John McCain speech at Republican National Convention New York, NY.

Laura Bush speech at  Republican National Convention New York, NY.

George W. Bush acceptance speech at Republican National Convention New York, NY.  (Currently not available on the TV News Archive.)

2008: Ted Kennedy speech at Democratic National Convention Denver, CO.

Michelle Obama speech at Democratic National Convention Denver, CO.

Bill Clinton speech at Democratic National Convention Denver, CO.

Joe Biden VP portion of acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Denver, CO.

Barack Obama acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Denver, CO.

Sarah Palin VP acceptance speech at Republican National Convention St. Paul, MN.

Cindy McCain speech at Republican National Convention St. Paul, MN.

John McCain acceptance speech at Republican National Convention St. Paul, MN.

2012: Barack Obama acceptance speech at Democratic National Convention Charlotte, NC CSPAN coverage.

Mitt Romney acceptance speech at Republican National Convention Tampa, FL CSPAN coverage.

Three takeaways after logging 1,032 political ads in the primaries

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The Political TV Ad Archive launched on January 22, 2016, with the goal of archiving airings of political ads across 20 local broadcast markets in nine key primary states and embedding fact checks and source checks of those ads by our journalism partners. We’re now wrapping up this first phase of the project, and are preparing for the second, where we’ll fundraise so we can apply the same approach to political ads in key 2016 general election battleground states.

But first: here are some takeaways from our collection after logging 1,032 ads. Of those ads, we captured 263 airing at least 100 times apiece, for a total all together of more than 145,000 airings.

1. Only a small number of ads earned “Pants on Fire!” or “Four Pinocchio” fact checking ratings. Just four ads received the worst ratings possible from our fact-checking partners.

Donald Trump’s campaign won the only “Pants on Fire” rating awarded by fact checking partner PolitiFact for a campaign ad: “Trump’s television ad purports to show Mexicans swarming over ‘our southern border.’ However, the footage used to support this point actually shows African migrants streaming over a border fence between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla, more than 5,000 miles away,” wrote PolitiFact reporters C. Eugene Emery Jr. and Louis Jacobson in early January, when Trump released the ad, his very first paid ad of the campaign. The ad aired more than 1,800 times, most heavily in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

Trump also won a “four Pinocchio” rating from the Washington Post’s Fact Checker for this ad which charges John Kasich of helping “Wall Street predator Lehman Brothers destroy the world economy.” “[I]t’s preposterous and simply not credible to say Kasich, as one managing director out of 700, in a firm of 25,000, “helped” the firm “destroy the world economy,” wrote reporter Michelle Ye Hee Lee.

Two other ads received the “four Pinocchio” rating from the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. This one, from Ted Cruz’s campaign, claims that Marco Rubio supported an immigration plan that would have given President Obama the authority to admit Syrian refugees, including ISIS terrorists. “[T]his statement is simply bizarre,” wrote Glenn Kessler. “With or without the Senate immigration bill, Obama had the authority to admit refugees, from any country, under the Refugee Act of 1980, as long as they are refugees and are admissible….What does ISIS have to do with it? Nothing. Terrorists are not admissible under the laws of the United States.”

This one, from Conservative Solutions PAC, the super PAC supporting Rubio, claims that there was only one “Republican helpful” who had “actually done something” to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, by inserting a provision preventing protection for insurance companies from losses if they didn’t do accurate estimates on the premiums in first three years of the law. “Rubio goes way too far in claiming credit here,” wrote Kessler. “He raised initial concerns about the risk-corridor provision, but the winning legislative strategy was executed by other lawmakers.”

Overall, our fact-checking and journalism partners—the Center for Responsive Politics, the Center for Public Integrity, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker—wrote 57 fact- and source-checks of 50 ads sponsored by presidential campaigns and outside groups. (The American Press Institute and Duke Reporters’ Lab, also partners, provided training and tools for journalists fact checking ads.)

Of the 25 fact checks done by PolitiFact, 60 percent of the ads earned “Half True,” “Mostly True,” and “True” ratings, with the remainder earning “Mostly False,” “False,” and “Pants on Fire” ratings. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, the other fact-checking group that uses ratings, fact-checked 11 ads. Of these, seven earned ratings of three or four Pinocchios. A series of ads featuring former employees and students denouncing Trump University, from a “dark money” group that doesn’t disclose its donors, earned the coveted “Geppetto Checkmark” for accuracy. Those ads aired widely in Florida and Ohio leading up to the primaries there.

The ad that produced the most fact checks and source checks was this one from the very same group, the American Future Fund, for an attack ad on John Kasich. Robert Farley of FactCheck.org wrote, “An ad from a conservative group attacks Ohio Gov. John Kasich as an ‘Obama Republican,’ and misleadingly claims his budget ‘raised taxes by billions, hitting businesses hard and the middle class even harder.'” PolitiFact Ohio reporter Nadia Pflaum gave the ad a “False” rating; Michelle Ye Hee Lee of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker awarded it “Three Pinocchios.” The Center for Public Integrity described the American Future Fund as “a conservative nonprofit linked to the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch that since 2010 has inundated federal and state races with tens of millions of dollars.”

This ad from Donald Trump’s campaign earned a “Pants on Fire” rating from PolitiFact.

2. Super Campaign Dodger, and other creative ways to experience and analyze political ads. Journalists did some serious digging into the downloadable metadata the Political TV Ad Archive provides here to analyze trends in presidential ad campaigns.

The Economist mashed up data about airings in Iowa and New Hampshire with polling data and asked the question: Does political advertising work? The answer—”a bit of MEH” (or, “minimal-effects hypothesis”)—in other words, voters are persuaded, but just the littlest bit.

Farai Chideya of FiveThirtyEight and Kate Stohr of Fusion delved into data on anti-Trump ads airing ahead of the Florida primary—which Trump went on to win handily, despite the onslaught.

Nick Niedzwiadek plumbed the collection when writing about political ad gaffes for The Wall Street Journal. Nadja Popovich of The Guardian graphed Bernie Sanders’s surge in ad airings in Nevada, ahead of the contest there.

William La Jeunesse of Fox News reported on negative ads here. Philip Bump of The Washington Post used gifs to illustrate just how painful it was to be a TV-watching voter in South Carolina in the lead up to the primary there.

And in what was the most interactive use of the project’s metadata, Andrew McGill, a senior associate editor for The Atlantic, created an old-style video game, where the viewer uses the space key on a computer keyboard to try to dodge all the ads that aired on Iowa airwaves ahead of the caucuses there. For links to other journalists’ uses of the Political TV Ad Archive, click here.

via GIPHY
3. Candidates’ campaigns dominated; super PACs favored candidates who failed. In our collection, candidates’ official campaigns sponsored the most ad airings—63 percent. Super PACs accounted for another 27 percent, and nonprofit groups, often called “dark money” groups because they do not disclose their donors, accounted for nine percent of ad airings.

Bernie Sanders‘ and Hillary Clinton‘s campaigns had the most ad airings—29,347 and 26,891 respectively. Of the GOP candidates, who faced a more divided competition, it was Marco Rubio’s campaign that had the most airings—11,798—and Donald Trump was second, with 9,590. However, in the Republican field, super PACs played a much bigger role, particularly those advocating for candidates who have since pulled out of the race. Conservative Solutions PAC, the super PAC that supported Marco Rubio in his candidacy, showed 12,851 airings; Right to Rise, which supported Jeb Bush, had 12,543.

This pair of issue ads sponsored by the AARP (aka the American Association of Retired People), aired at least 9,653 times; the ads focus on social security and have been broadcast across the markets monitored by the Political TV Ad Archive.

The biggest non-news shows that featured political ads were “Jeopardy!,” “Live With Kelly and Michael,” and “Wheel of Fortune.” Fusion did an analysis that showed that the most popular entertainment shows targeted by presidential candidates and mashed it up with Nielsen data about viewership. For example, Bernie Sanders’ campaign favored “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” while Hillary Clinton’s campaign likes “The Ellen Degeneres Show.”

 

Screenshot 2016-03-04 13.50.08

The Political TV Ad Archive–which is a project of the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive–is now conducting a thorough review of this project, which was funded by a grant from the Knight News Challenge, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Challenge is a joint effort of the Rita Allen Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation.

Stay tuned for news of the Political TV Ad Archive’s plans for covering future primaries in California, New York, and Pennsylvania, and beyond, our fundraising for the second phase of this project: fundraising to track ads in key battleground states in the general elections.

This post is cross posted at the Political TV Ad Archive.