Tag Archives: health care reform

TV News Record: McCain returns to vote, Spicer departs

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

Last week, Sean Spicer left his White House post and Anthony Scaramucci, the new communications director, made his mark; Sen. John McCain, R., Ariz., returned to the Senate floor to debate–and cast a deciding vote on–health care reform; and fact-checkers examined claims about Trump’s off-the-record meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and more.

McCain shows up in D.C. – and on Face-O-Matic

Last week, after we launched Face-O-Matic, an experimental Slack app that recognizes the faces of top public officials when they appear on TV news, we received a request from an Arizona-based journalism organization to track Sen. John McCain, R., Ariz.. Soon after we added the senator’s visage to Face-O-Matic, we started getting the alerts.

News anchors talked about how McCain’s possible absence because of his brain cancer diagnosis could affect upcoming debates and votes on health care.

Reporters gave background on how the Senate has dealt with absences due to illness in the past.

Pundits discussed McCain’s character, and his daughter provided a “loving portrait.” Then coverage shifted to report the senator’s return to Washington, and late last night his key no vote on the “skinny” health care repeal.



White House: Spicer out, Scaramucci in 

After Sean Spicer resigned as White House communications director, Fox News and MSNBC offered reviews of his time at the podium.

On Fox News, Howard Kurtz introduced Spicer as someone “long known to reporters as an affable spokesman; he became the president’s pit bull,” and went on to give a run-down of his controversial relationship with the press. The conclusion, “He lasted exactly, six months.”

MSNBC offered a mashup of some of Spicer’s most famous statements. These include: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” and “But you had a – you know, someone who is as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

Late this week, Ryan Lizza published an article in The New Yorker based on a phone call he received from the new White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, in which the new White House communications director used profanity to describe other members of the White House staff he accused of leaking information. That article soon became fodder for cable TV.



Schumer, Ryan weigh in on Mueller

As Special Counsel Robert Mueller widens his investigation into Russian interference in U.S. elections, speculation is running high on TV news that President Donald Trump might fire him.

Fox News ran a clip of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D., NY., saying, “I think it would cause a cataclysm in Washington.”

MSNBC ran a radio clip from House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis.:  “I don’t think many people are saying Bob Mueller is a person who is a biased partisan. We have an investigation in the House, an investigation in the Senate, and a special counsel which sort of depoliticizes this stuff and gets it out of the political theater.”



Fact-check: Transgender people in the military would lead to tremendous medical costs and disruption (lacks context)

In a series of tweets this week, President Trump wrote, “After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow… Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming… victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.”

For FactCheck.org, Eugene Kiely reported, “Although Trump described the cost as ‘tremendous,’ RAND estimated that providing transition-related health care would increase the military’s health care costs for active-duty members ‘by between $2.4 million and $8.4 million annually.’ That represents an increase of no more than 0.13 percent of the $6.27 billion spent on the health of active-duty members in fiscal 2014.”



Fact Check: Nixon held meetings with heads of state without an American interpreter (true)

Speaking on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, said:  “Apparently, President Nixon used to do it because he felt, didn’t really trust the State Department, at that point, providing the translators and didn’t necessarily want information getting out, leaking, that he would want to keep private.”

“True,” wrote Joshua Gillan for PolitiFact: “Presidential historians, historical accounts and Nixon’s own memoir show this was the case. But it’s notable that even in the example most comparable to Trump’s meeting with Putin, when Nixon used only a Soviet translator during two meetings with Brezhnev, official records of the meeting exist.”



Fact-check: Allowing insurers to sell plans across state lines will mean premiums go down 60-70% (no evidence)

Not long before the Senate took up health care reform, President Donald Trump said “We’re putting it [allowing insurers to sell plans across state lines] in a popular bill, and that will come. And that will come, and your premiums will be down 60 and 70 percent.”

FactCheck.org’s Lori Robertson reported the “National Association of Insurance Commissioners — a support organization established by the country’s state insurance regulators — said the idea that cross-state sales would bring about lower premiums was a ‘myth.’”



Fact-Check: When the price for oil goes up, it goes up, and never goes down (false)

In an interview Sunday about the new Democratic Party national agenda, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D., N.Y., said, “We have these huge companies buying up other big companies. It hurts workers and it hurts prices. The old Adam Smith idea of competition, it’s gone. So people hate it when their cable bills go up, their airline fees. They know that gas prices are sticky. You know … when the price for oil goes up on the markets, it goes right up, but it never goes down.”

For PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson reported, “This comment takes a well-known phenomenon and exaggerates it beyond recognition. While experts agree that prices tend to go up quickly after a market shock but usually come down more slowly once the shock is resolved, this phenomenon only occurs on a short-term basis – a couple of weeks in most cases.”

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TV News Record: adventures with Face-O-Matic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



Follow the TV

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

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

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

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

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

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