Tag Archives: PolitiFact

TV News Record: Caption analyses, plus fact-checks on wall & immigrants

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

This week we bring you analyses of cable TV news coverage and fact-checks of recent statements by President Donald Trump on immigration and his proposed wall on the border with Mexico.

Vox & Post turn TV news captions into media analysis

Vox’s Alvin Chang and The Washington Post’s Philip Bump continue to turn TV News Archive caption data, via Television Explorer, into analyses of current news. Chang analyzes cable TV network coverage of the March for Our Lives, an anti-gun violence demonstration, reporting that on Fox News, “There was a massive spike in mentions of the “Second Amendment” or “Constitution” during the peak of the march, and most of those mentions came from pundits and guests on the network.”

Source: Vox

Bump’s piece examines mentions of Hillary Clinton on cable TV news networks compared to those of Stormy Daniels, the adult entertainer involved in a legal dispute with the president. He finds that Fox News mentions Clinton the most, while CNN features more coverage of Daniels.

Source: The Washington Post

Fact-Check: We’ve started building the wall (Mostly False/Three Pinocchios)

During a press conference with the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, President Donald Trump talked about his proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico: “We have to have strong borders. We need the wall. We’ve started building the wall, as you know, we have a $1.6 billion toward building the wall and fixing existing wall that’s falling down, it was never appropriate in the first place.”

The funding the president references comes from a spending bill recently passed by Congress. The omnibus “bill included $1.6 billion for some projects at the border, but none of that can be used toward the border wall promised during the presidential campaign.” For PolitiFact, Miriam Valverde rates the president’s claim “Mostly False.”

At The Washington Post’s Fact-Checker, Glenn Kessler gives the same claim “three Pinocchios”:

The White House failed miserably to achieve its objectives on funding for a border wall, receiving relative peanuts. It sought $25 billion, but ended up with just 5 percent of that. Moreover, the money came with strings attached so that it could only be used for fencing, not the “great” and “beautiful wall” promised by Trump.

In Orwellian fashion, fences have now become walls. Even then, the president has only secured enough money to pay for one-tenth of the new fence/wall he has sought.


Fact-Check: Caravans of people are coming to cross the U.S.-Mexico border (Half True)

Just after Fox News aired a segment on a caravan of people from Central America making its way through Mexico toward the United States, the president wrote on Twitter:

“Half True,” writes W. Gardner Shelby for PolitiFact: “President Trump tweeted that caravans of immigrants are coming to the Mexico-U.S. border… We confirmed that a caravan of 1,200 to 1,500 people from Central America–not caravans–was in southern Mexico, about 900 miles from the Rio Grande, when Trump tweeted. Also, accounts vary on whether all participants are bound to enter the U.S. An organizer estimated that most of the people intend to remain in Mexico.”

Reporting for FactCheck.org, Robert FarleyEugene Kiely and Lori Robertson write “Trump’s messages included muddled and inaccurate claims.” They summarize with the following bullet points:

  • Contrary to Trump’s assertion, there is no “liberal (Democrat)” law requiring the “Catch & Release” of people caught illegally crossing the border. There are court cases and laws that require some unaccompanied children, families and asylum-seekers to be released in the U.S., pending an immigration hearing. But it’s a stretch to blame those entirely on Democrats.

  • Trump said “big flows of people” are illegally entering the U.S. from Mexico “to take advantage of DACA.” In fact, current border-crossers are not eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

  • Trump said that “caravans” of people were coming to the Southwest border and that Mexico “must stop them.” The caravan, a yearly demonstration, was organized by the activist group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which says the people walking in the caravan have “a lot of intentions,” with some wanting to stay in Mexico. The caravan is now in southern Mexico, more than 800 miles from the U.S. border.

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TV News Record: How cable TV news reports news, fact-checks on banking, trade, and public lands

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

This week, we present a Washington Post analysis of coverage of an alleged affair by the president; a Vox piece examining coverage of Andrew McCabe, the former deputy FBI director; and The Toronto Star’s use of a salient clip to illustrate a point about a presidential appointment. We also show fact-checks from FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post’s Fact-Checker on claims related to banking, public lands, and trade policy.

Chicken-egg question on cable news coverage of alleged affair

CNN and MSNBC hosts and guests are talking a lot more about the alleged past affair between President Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels than Fox News is, according to Philip Bump’s latest analysis for The Washington Post using TV News Archive data via Television Explorer. 

Bump used the analysis as context to dig into a poll released by Suffolk University earlier this month: “One-fifth of Americans said that Fox News was the news or commentary source they trusted the most, a group that was primarily made up of Republicans… There’s a chicken-egg question here. Does Fox give the Stormy Daniels story a light touch because its audience is largely supportive of Trump or is Fox’s audience largely supportive of Trump because of the coverage they see on Fox? Or is it both?”

Did Fox News reporting contribute to perception of fired FBI official?

Vox’s Alvin Chang argues a connection between the firing of Andrew McCabe, former FBI deputy director, to a narrative built up over the course of months by Fox News. Using TV News Archive data via Television Explorer, Chang reports that “long before he was fired, Fox News… constantly referred to McCabe as the quintessential example of the FBI’s corruption and anti-Trump bias. They hinted that he was plotting several schemes against Trump during the election, leaking information to the press, and was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and Democrats.” This, he writes, allowed FOX News viewers to think it made “perfect sense for Attorney General Jeff Sessions (perhaps directed by Trump) to fire McCabe.” Chang goes on to warn, “This alternate reality is being fed into the president’s mind.”


What new presidential economic pick had to say about Canadian PM

The Toronto Star embedded a TV news clip in a piece on Trump’s pick to replace his economic advisor. Larry Kudlow, who is taking over from Gary Cohn as economic advisor, had said of U.S. trade policy:  “NAFTA is the key. And unfortunately we’re going after a major NAFTA ally, and perhaps America’s greatest ally, namely Canada. Even with this left-wing crazy guy Trudeau, they’re still our pals. They’re still our pals. Why are we going after them?” The clip has been viewed more than 112,000 times and counting.


Fact-Check: Senate banking bill a big win for Wall Street (Yes and No)

In a floor speech, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D., Mass., said of the latest proposal to make changes to Dodd-Frank, “This bill is about goosing the bottom line and executive bonuses at the banks that make up the top one half of 1 percent of banks in this country by size. The very tippy-top.”

Manuela Tobias reported for PolitiFact: “The bill raises the bar of what is considered a big bank five-fold, which effectively relaxes the standards for large regional banks. Experts warn this also could open a door for bigger Wall Street bank giveaways.

The bill also has a few provisions affecting banks above $250 billion in assets. However, the effects would largely depend on the Federal Reserve’s interpretation of the law. The biggest banks might be able to get relaxed regulations, but then again, they might not.”


Fact-Check: Public lands proposal largest in history (False)

In a Senate hearing on the budget for the Dept. of the Interior, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said the president’s proposal “is the largest investment in our public lands infrastructure in our nation’s history. Let me repeat that, this is the largest investment in our public lands infrastructure in the history of this country.”

PolitiFact rates the claim false. Louis Jacobson reported: “It’s far from assured that the maximum figure of $18 billion in the proposal will ever be reached if enacted. Beyond that, though, Roosevelt’s $3 billion investment in the Civilian Conservation Corps would amount to $53 billion today, and it accounted for vastly more than the Trump proposal as a percentage of federal spending at the time.”

Fact-Check: U.S. has trade deficit with Canada (Four Pinocchios)

After a private meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump defended his view about U.S.-Canada trade, tweeting, “We do have a Trade Deficit with Canada, as we do with almost all countries (some of them massive). P.M. Justin Trudeau of Canada, a very good guy, doesn’t like saying that Canada has a Surplus vs. the U.S.(negotiating), but they do … they almost all do … and that’s how I know!”

Glenn Kessler reports for The Washington Post’s Fact Checker that the president is not including services in his analysis of the trade relationship with Canada. He adds: “The president frequently suggests the United States is losing money with these deficits, but countries do not ‘lose’ money on trade deficits. A trade deficit simply means that people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first.” Kessler gives the claim four Pinocchios.

Eugene Kiely reports for FactCheck.org that the president’s claim that figures giving the U.S. a trade surplus with Canada are not including timber and energy is “not accurate. The Census Bureau, which is within the U.S. Department of Commerce, said its trade figures do include timber and energy and referred us to two publications that show that the agency does include timber and energy for imports and exports.”

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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 Record: With indictment, chyrons & captions get a graphic workout

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

Fox News downplayed Mueller indictment, according to NYT editorial chyron analysis

In the most intensive use the Internet Archive’s Third Eye data to date, The New York Times editorial page analyzed chyron data to show how Fox News downplayed this week’s news of the indictment of former Trump campaign manager and other legal developments. The graphic-heavy opinion piece was featured at the top of the online homepage much of the day on Wednesday, Nov. 1:

Though it is far from the only possible way to evaluate news coverage, the chyron has become something of a touchstone for media analysts, being both the most obvious visual example of spin or distraction and the most shareable. Any negative coverage of the president usually prompts a flurry of tweets cataloguing the differences among networks in their chyron text. While CNN, MSNBC and the BBC are typically in alignment, Monday morning was a particularly stark example of how Fox News pushes its own version of reality.

 Read The New York Times opinion piece, and dig into the data yourself.

Captions yield insights on Mueller investigation, shooting coverage

Fox News actively tried to “plant doubt in viewers’ minds” as Mueller brought charges against former Trump campaign officials, according to an analysis of a week’s worth of closed captions by Alvin Chang of Vox News. Chang used Television Explorer, fueled by TV News Archive data, to crunch the numbers behind charts such as the one below.

And The Trace, an independent, nonprofit news organization that focuses on gun violence, used TV News Archive caption data via Television Explorer to show how TV news coverage of mass shootings declines quickly.

Face-o-Matic captures congressional leaders reactions on indictments

In the 24 hours following news breaking about the indictments, our Face-o-Matic data feed captured cable news networks’ editorial choices on how much face-time to allot to congressional leaders’ reactions. The answer: not much.

All together the four congressional leaders’ faces were shown for a total of 2.5 minutes on indictment-related reporting on screen by CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Ryan got the lion’s share of the attention. Much of this was devoted to airings of his photo in connection with his official statement,“[N]othing is going to derail what we are doing in Congress, because we are working on solving people’s problems.”

The image of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, K., Ky., was not featured by any network. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., got attention only from Fox News, which featured her photo with discussion of her statement, in which she said despite the news, “we still need an outside fully independent investigation.”


Fact-check:Papadopoulos had a limited role in Trump campaign (had seat at table/not the whole story)

One of the most parsed statements this week was White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ claim that George Papadopolous, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, had an “extremely limited” role in the campaign. “It was a volunteer position,” she said. “And again, no activity was ever done in an official capacity on behalf of the campaign.”

“Determining how important Papadopoulos was on the Trump team is open to interpretation, so we won’t put this argument to the Truth-O-Meter,” wrote Louis Jacobson, reporting for PolitiFact. Jacobson, however, laid out the known facts. For example, in March 2016, then presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted out a photo of himself and advisors sitting at a table, saying it was a “national security meeting.” Papadopoulos is seen at the table sitting near future Attorney General Jeff Sessions. However, Jacobson also writes,“There is some evidence to support the argument that Papadopoulos was freelancing by pushing the Russia connection.”

Reviewing Sanders’ claim, as well as a Trump tweet along similar lines, Robert Farley and Eugene Kiely took a similar tack for FactCheck.org, concluding that Papadopoulos had a “seat at the table” in the campaign, but it was beyond licking envelopes and posting lawn signs:  “What we do know is that during this time — from late March to mid-August — Papadopoulos was in regular contact with senior Trump campaign officials and attended a national security meeting with Trump. We will let readers decide if this constitutes a ‘low-level volunteer.'”


Embed TV News Archive clips on web annotations

Now you can embed TV News Archive news clips when commenting and annotating the web, thanks to a new integration from Hypothes.is. From the Hypothesis.is blog:

This integration makes it easy for journalists, fact-checkers, educators, scholars and anyone that wants to relate specific text in a webpage, PDF, or EPUB to a particular snippet of video news coverage. All you need to do to use it is copy the URL of a TV News Archive video page, paste it into the Hypothesis annotation editor and save your annotation. You can adjust the start and end of the video to include any exact snippet. The video will then automatically be available to view in your annotation alongside the annotated text.

See a live example of the integration in this annotation with an embedded news video of Senator Charles Schumer at a news conference over a post that checks the facts in one of his statements.

“This integration means that one of the world’s most valuable resources — the news that the Internet Archive captures across the world everyday — will be able to be brought into close context with pages and documents across the web,” said Hypothesis CEO Dan Whaley. “For instance, a video of a politician making an actual statement next to an excerpt that claims the opposite, or a video of a newsworthy event next to a deeper analysis of it.”

Please take Hypothes.is for a spin and let us know what you think: tvnews@archive.org.

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TV News Record: Third Eye goes to Trump press conference

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.

All three major U.S. cable news networks covered President Donald Trump’s impromptu press conference with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., on Monday, October 16, but there were notable differences in their editorial choices for chyrons – the captions that appear in real-time on the bottom third of the screen – throughout the broadcast. We used the TV News Archive’s new Third Eye chryon extraction data tool to demonstrate these differences, similar to how The Washington Post examined FBI director James B. Comey’s hearing in June 2017.

The beauty of the Third Eye tool is you can do this too, any time there is breaking news or a widely covered live event, like yesterday’s Senate judiciary committee hearing where AG Jeff Sessions testified (7:31am-9:46am PT) or the October 5 White House briefing about Puerto Rico (11:20am-11:48am PT). Third Eye data – which includes chyrons from BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC – is available for data download, via API, in both raw and filtered formats. (Get into the weeds over on the Third Eye collection page.) Please take Third Eye for a spin, and let us know if you have questions: tvnews@archive.org or @tvnewsarchive.

For example, at 11:03 PT, Trump began answering a question about pharmaceutical companies “making money.” MSNBC chooses a chyron that characterizes Trump’s statements as a claim, whereas Fox News displays Trump’s assertion that Obamacare is a disaster. CNN goes with a chyron saying that Trump is “very happy” to end Obamacare subsidies.  In the following minute, 11:04, Fox News chooses other bold statements from Trump: “I do not need pharma money” and “I want tax reform this year.” CNN’s chyron instead says Trump “would like to see” tax reform, a less bold statement.

(Note: these are representative chryons from the minute period and did not necessarily display for the full 60-second period.)

Later in the press conference, the discussion turns to natural disasters before then focusing on the proposed wall on the border with Mexico. Again, Fox News features Trump making bold, simple assertions: “we are getting high marks for our hurricane response,” and “PR was in bad shape before the storm hit.” MSNBC instead uses the word “claims”: “Trump claims Puerto Rico now has more generators than any place in the world.”

Watch the Trump-McConnell press conference in context on C-Span.

Fact-check: Sen. McCaskill not present for bill to weaken DEA (four Pinocchios)

The day following The Washington Post-60 Minutes report on legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama to weaken the authority of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D., Mo., called for repeal of the law. In an interview, she also said, “Now, I did not go along with this. I wasn’t here at the time. I was actually out getting breast cancer treatment. I don’t know that I would have objected. I like to believe I would have, but the bottom line is, once the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] kind of, the upper levels at the DEA obviously said it was okay, that’s what gave it the green light.”

But “despite her claim that she ‘wasn’t here at the time,’ McCaskill was clearly back at the Senate, participating in votes and hearings,” according to The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker’s Glenn Kessler. “McCaskill’s staff acknowledged the error, saying that they had forgotten she had come back at that time. ‘It was sloppy on our part, and we take responsibility,’ a spokesman said.”


Fact-check: Pressure from Trump led to stepped up NATO members’ defense spending (half true)

In an interview on October 15, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said, “The president early on called upon NATO member countries to step up their contributions — step up their commitment to NATO, modernize their own forces… He’s been very clear, and as a result of that countries have stepped up contributions toward their own defense.”

PolitiFact reporter Allison Graves found that “25 NATO allies plan to increase spending in real terms in 2017.” And “according to NATO, over the last 3 years, European allies and Canada spent almost $46 billion more on defense, meaning increases in spending have occurred before Trump’s presidency. Experts said it’s possible that Trump’s pressure has contributed to the continuation of the upward trend, but Tillerson’s explanation glazes over the other factors that have led to increases, including the conflict in the Ukraine in 2014.”

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History is happening, and we’re not just watching

  1. Which recent hurricane got the least amount of attention from TV news broadcasters?
    1. Irma
    2. Maria
    3. Harvey
  2. Thomas Jefferson said, “Government that governs least governs best.”
    1. True
    2. False
  3. Mitch McConnell shows up most on which cable TV news channel?
    1. CNN
    2. Fox News
    3. MSNBC

Answers at end of post.

The Internet Archive’s TV News Archive, our constantly growing online, free library of TV news broadcasts, contains 1.4 million shows, some dating back to 2009, searchable by closed captioning. History is happening, and we preserve how broadcast news filters it to us, the audience, whether it’s through CNN’s Jake Tapper, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow or others. This archive becomes a rich resource for journalists, academics, and the general public to explore the biases embedded in news coverage and to hold public officials accountable.

Last October we wrote how the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive was “hacking the election,” then 13 days away. In the year since, we’ve been applying our experience using machine learning to track political ads and TV news coverage in the 2016 elections to experiment with new collaborations and tools to create more ways to analyze the news.

Helping fact-checkers

Since we launched our Trump Archive in January 2017, and followed in August with the four congressional leaders, Democrat and Republican, as well as key executive branch figures, we’ve collected some 4,534 hours of curated programming and more than 1,300 fact-checks of material on subjects ranging from immigration to the environment to elections.

 

The 1,340 fact-checks–and counting–represent a subset of the work of partners FactCheck.orgPolitiFact and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, as we link only to fact-checks that correspond to statements that appear on TV news. Most of the fact-checks–524–come from PolitiFact; 492 are by FactCheck.org, and 324 from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.

We’re also proud to be part of the Duke Reporter’s Lab’s new Tech & Check collaborative, where we’re working with journalists and computer scientists to develop ways to automate parts of the fact-checking process.  For example, we’re creating processes to help identify important factual claims within TV news broadcasts to help guide fact-checkers where to concentrate their efforts. The initiative received $1.2 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project and the Craig Newmark Foundation.

See the TrumpUS Congress, and executive branch archives and collected fact-checks.

TV News Kitchen

We’re collaborating with data scientists, private companies and nonprofit organizations, journalists, and others to cook up new experiments available in our TV News Kitchen, providing new ways to analyze TV news content and understand ourselves.

Dan Schultz, our senior creative technologist, worked with the start-up Matroid to develop Face-o-Matic, which tracks faces of selected high level elected officials on major TV cable news channels: CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and BBC News. The underlying data are available for download here. Unlike caption-based searches, Face-o-Matic uses facial recognition algorithms to recognize individuals on TV news screens. It is sensitive enough to catch this tiny, dark image of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., within a graphic, and this quick flash of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D., N.Y., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky.

The work of TV Architect Tracey Jaquith, our Third Eye project scans the lower thirds of TV screens, using OCR, or optical character recognition, to turn these fleeting missives into downloadable data ripe for analysis. Launched in September 2017, Third Eye tracks BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and collected more than four million chyrons captured in just over two weeks, and counting.

Download Third Eye data. API and TSV options available.

Follow Third Eye on Twitter.

Vox news reporter Alvin Chang used the Third Eye chyron data to report how Fox News paid less attention to Hurricane Maria’s destruction in Puerto Rico than it did to Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, which battered Florida and Texas. Chang’s work followed a similar piece by Dhrumil Mehta for FiveThirtyEight, which used Television Explorer, a tool developed by data scientist Kalev Leetaru to search and visualize closed captioning on the TV News Archive.

 

FiveThirtyEight used TV News Archive captions to create this look at how cable networks covered recent hurricanes.

CNN’s Brian Stelter followed up with a similar analysis on “Reliable Sources” October 1.

We’re also working with academics who are using our tools to unlock new insights. For example, Schultz and Jaquith are working with Bryce Dietrich at the University of Iowa to apply the Duplitron, the audiofingerprinting tool that fueled our political ad airing data, to analyze floor speeches of members of Congress. The study identifies which floor speeches were aired on cable news programs and explores the reasons why those particular clips were selected for airing. A draft of the paper was presented in the 2017 Polinfomatics Workshop in Seattle and will begin review for publication in the coming months.

What’s next? Our plans include making more than a million hours of TV news available to researchers from both private and public institutions via a digital public library branch of the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive. These branches would be housed in computing environments, where networked computers provide the processing power needed to analyze large amounts of data. Researchers will be able to conduct their own experiments using machine learning to extract metadata from TV news. Such metadata could include, for example, speaker identification–a way to identify not just when a speaker appears on a screen, but when she or he is talking. Metadata generated through these experiments would then be used to enrich the TV News Archive, so that any member of the public could do increasingly sophisticated searches.

Going global

We live in an interdependent world, but we often lack understanding about how other cultures perceive us. Collecting global TV could open a new window for journalists and researchers seeking to understand how political and policy messages are reported and spread across the globe. The same tools we’ve developed to track political ads, faces, chyrons, and captions can help us put news coverage from around the globe into perspective.

We’re beginning work to expand our TV collection to include more channels from around the globe. We’ve added the BBC and recently began collecting Deutsche Welle from Germany and the English-language Al Jazeera. We’re talking to potential partners and developing strategy about where it’s important to collect TV and how we can do so efficiently.

History is happening, but we’re not just watching. We’re collecting, making it accessible, and working with others to find new ways to understand it. Stay tuned. Email us at tvnews@archive.org. Follow us @tvnewsarchive, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Answer Key

  1. b. (See: “The Media Really Has Neglected Puerto Rico,” FiveThirtyEight.
  2. b. False. (See: Vice President Mike Pence statement and linked PolitiFact fact-check.)
  3. c. MSNBC. (See: Face-O-Matic blog post.)

Members of the TV News Archive team: Roger Macdonald, director; Robin Chin, Katie Dahl, Tracey Jaquith, Dan Schultz, and Nancy Watzman.

TV News Record: 1,340 fact checks collected and counting

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

In an era when social media algorithms skew what people see online, the Internet Archive TV News Archive’s collections of on-the-record statements by top political figures serves  as a powerful model for how preservation can provide a deep resource for who really said what, when, and where.

Since we launched our Trump Archive in January 2017, and followed in August with the four congressional leaders, Democrat and Republican, as well as key executive branch figures, we’ve collected some 4,534 hours of curated programming and more than 1,300 fact-checks of material on subjects ranging from immigration to the environment to elections.

The 1,340 fact-checks–and counting–represent a subset of the work of partners FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, as we link only to fact-checks that correspond to statements that appear on TV news. Most of the fact-checks–524–come from PolitiFact; 492 are by FactCheck.org, and 324 from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.

As a library, we’re dedicated to providing a record – sometimes literally, as in the case of 78s! – that can help researchers, journalists, and the public find trustworthy sources for our collective history. These clip collections, along with fact-checks, now largely hand-curated, provide a quick way to find public statements made by elected officials.

See the Trump, US Congress, and executive branch archives and collected fact-checks.

The big picture

Given his position at the helm of the government, it is not surprising that Trump garners most of the fact-checking attention.  Three out of four, or 1008 of the fact-checks, focus on Trump’s statements. Another 192 relate to the four congressional leaders: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky.; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D., N.Y.; House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis.; and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif. We’ve also logged 140 fact-checks related to key administration figures such as Sean Spicer, Jeff Sessions, and Mike Pence.

pie chart

The topics

The topics covered by fact-checkers run the gamut of national and global policy issues, history, and everything in between. For example, the debate on tax reform is grounded with fact-checks of the historical and global context posited by the president. Fact-checkers have also examined his aides’ claims on the impact of the current reform proposal on the wealthy and on the deficit. They’ve also followed the claims made by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., the leading GOP policy voice on tax reform.

Another large set of fact-checks cover health care, going back as far as this claim made in 2010 by Pelosi about job creation under healthcare reform (PolitiFact rated it “Half True.”) The most recent example is the Graham-Cassidy bill that aimed to repeal much of Obamacare. One of the most sharply contested debates about that legislation was whether or not it would require coverage of people with pre-existing conditions. Fact-checkers parsed the he-said he-said debate as it unfolded on TV news, for example examining dueling claims by Schumer and Trump.

Browse or download  fact-checked TV clips by topic

The old stuff

The collection of Trump fact checks include a few dating back to 2011, long before his successful presidential campaign. Here he is at the CPAC conference that year claiming no one remembered now-former President Barack Obama from school, part of his campaign to question Obama’s citizenship. (PolitiFact rated: “Pants on Fire!”) And here he is with what FactCheck.org called a “100 percent wrong” claim about the Egyptian people voting to overturn a treaty with Israel.

This fact-check of McConnell dates back to 2009, when PolitiFact rated “false” his claim of how much federal spending occurred under Obama’s watch: “In just one month, the Democrats have spent more than President Bush spent in seven years on the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and Hurricane Katrina combined.”

Meanwhile, this 2010 statement by Schumer, rated “mostly false” by PolitiFact, asserted that the U.S. Supreme Court “decided to overrule the 100-year-old ban on corporate expenditures.” The ban on giving directly to candidates is still in place; however,  corporations are free to spend unlimited funds on elections providing they do so separate from a candidate’s official campaign.

The repetition

Twenty-four million people will be forced off their health insurance, young farmers have to sell the farm to pay estate tax, NATO members owe the United States money, millions of women turn to Planned Parenthood for mammograms, and sanctuary cities lead to higher crime. These are all examples of claims found to be inaccurate or misleading, but that continued or continue to be repeated by public officials.

The unexpected

Whether you lean one political direction or another, there are always surprises from the fact-checkers that can keep all our assumptions in check. For example, if you’re opposed to building a wall on the southern border to keep people from crossing into the U.S., you might guess Trump’s claim that people use catapults to toss drugs over current walls is an exaggeration. In fact, that statement was rated “mostly true” by PolitiFact. Or if you’re conservative, you might be surprised to learn an often repeated quote ascribed to Thomas Jefferson, in this case by Vice President Mike Pence, is in fact falsely attributed to him.

How to find

If you’re looking for the most recent TV news statements with fact-checks, you can see the latest offerings on the TV Archive’s homepage by scrolling down.

screen grab of place on tv homepageYou can review whole speeches, scanning for just the fact-checked claims by looking for the fact-check icon  on a program timeline. For example, starting in the Trump Archive, you can choose a speech or interview and see if and how many of the statements were checked by reporters.

screen grab of timeline w icons

You can also find the fact-checks in the growing table, also available to download, which includes details on the official making the claim, the topic(s) covered, the url for the corresponding TV news clip, and the link to the fact-checking article.

image of fact-checks table

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TV News Record: Wayback Machine saves deleted prez tweets

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

In this week’s TV News Archive roundup, we explain how presidential tweets are forever, show how different TV cable news networks summarized NFL protests via Third Eye chyron data, and present FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of hurricane coverage (hint: Puerto Rico got less attention.)

Wayback Machine preserved deleted prez tweets; PolitiFact fact-checks legality of prez tweet deletions (murky)

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has preserved President Donald Trump’s deleted tweets praising failed GOP Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Luther Strange following his defeat by Roy Moore on September 26. So does the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism site ProPublica, through its Politwoops project.

The story of Trump’s deleted tweets about Strange was reported far and wide, including this segment on MSNBC’s “Deadline Whitehouse” that aired on September 27.

In a fact-check on the legality of a president deleting tweets, linked in the TV News Archive clip above, John Kruzel, reports for PolitiFact that the law is murky but still being fleshed out:

Experts were split over how much enforcement power courts have in the arena of presidential record-keeping, though most seemed to agree the president has the upper hand.

“One of the problems with the Presidential Records Act is that it does not have a lot of teeth,” said Douglas Cox, a professor at the City University of New York School of Law. “The courts have held that the president has wide and almost unreviewable discretion to interpret the Presidential Records Act.”

That said, many of the experts we spoke to are closely monitoring how the court responds to the litigation around Trump administration record-keeping.

He also provides background on that litigation, a lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The case is broadly about requirements for preserving presidential records, and a previous set of deleted presidential tweets is a part of it.

Fact Check: NFL attendance and ratings are way down because people love their country (Mostly false)

Speaking of Trump’s tweets, the president ignited an explosion of coverage with an early morning tweet on Sunday, Sept. 24, ahead of a long day of football games: “NFL attendance and ratings are WAY DOWN. Boring games yes, but many stay away because they love our country.”

Manuela Tobias of PolitiFact rated this claim as “mostly false,” reporting, “Ratings were down 8 percent in 2016, but experts said the drop was modest and in line with general ratings for the sports industry. The NFL remains the most watched televised sports event in the United States.” “As for political motivation, there’s little evidence to suggest people are boycotting the NFL. Most of the professional sports franchises are dealing with declines in popularity.”

How did different cable TV news networks cover the NFL protests?

We first used the Television Explorer tool to see where there was a spike in the use of the word “NFL” near the word “Trump.” It looked like Sunday showed the most use of these words. After a  closer look, we saw MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN all showed highest mentions of these terms around 2 pm Pacific.

Spike at 2 pm (PST) for CNN, MSNBC, and CNN

Then we downloaded data from the new Third Eye project, which turns TV News chyrons into data, filtering for that date and hour. We were able to see how the three cable news networks were summarizing the news at that particular point in time.

At about 2:02, CNN broadcast this chyron“NFL teams kneel, link arms in defiance of Trump.”

Screen grab of chyron caught by Third Eye from 2:02 pm 9/24/17 on CNN

Fox News chose the following, also seen below tweeted from one of the Third Eye twitter bots: “Some NFL owners criticize Trump’s statements on player protests, link arms with players”

Meanwhile, MSNBC chose a different message “Taking a knee: NFL teams send a message.”

Screen grab of chyron caught by Third Eye from 2:02 pm 9/24/17 on MSNBC

About eight minutes later, all three cable channels were still reporting on the NFL protests:

Puerto Rico’s hurricane Maria got less media attention than hurricanes Harvey & Irma

Writing for FiveThirtyEight.com, Dhrumil Mehta demonstrated that both online news sites and TV news broadcasters paid less attention to Puerto Rico’s hurricane Marie than to hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which hit mainland U.S. primarily in Texas and Florida. Mehta used TV News Archive data via Television Explorer, as well as data from Media Cloud on online news coverage, to help make his case:

While Puerto Rico suffers after Hurricane Maria, much of the U.S. media (FiveThirtyEight not excepted) has been occupied with other things: a health care bill that failed to pass, a primary election in Alabama, and a spat between the president and sports players, just to name a few. Last Sunday alone, after President Trump’s tweets about the NFL, the phrase “national anthem” was said in more sentences on TV news than “Puerto Rico” and “Hurricane Maria” combined.

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TV News Record: North Korea plus Vox on Fox

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.

This week we look at how different cable networks explained newly inflamed U.S.-North Korea tensions. Which channel seemed to repeat a particular phrase, like “fire and fury” the most in the last few days?  What did fact-checking partners have to report on President Donald’s Trump’s tweeted threat against North Korea? Plus: a Vox analysis of Fox based on TV News Archive closed captioning data.

“Fire and fury” popular on CNN

Over a 72-hour-period, CNN mentioned President Donald Trump’s “fire and fury”  threat against North Korea more than other major cable networks, according to a search on the Television Explorer, a tool created by data scientist Kalev Leetaru and powered by TV News Archive data.

“fire and fury” search 819am MST 8.11.17


Morning show reactions day after “fire and fury” statement

While a Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade said President Trump was “right on target” with his threat against North Korea, a Fox Business Network morning show hosted Center for National Interest’s Harry Kazianis who blamed former President Barack Obama for the current U.S.-North Korea tensions. Meanwhile, host Lauren Simonetti and showed viewers a map of potential trajectories of missiles from North Korea to the continental U.S., saying “you can see they have the ability to strike major cities, including New York City and Washington, D.C..”

On a BBC morning show, the PC Agency CEO Paul Charles said President Trump “is talking like a dictator himself to some extent,” and offered his opinion on the geopolitical context, saying “it’s in their [China’s] own interest to try and find some territorial gain in the region, so I’m not convinced China can the answer.”

C-SPAN aired footage of an interview with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in which he said “I do not believe there is any imminent threat” and that though he was on his way to Guam which North Korea said it was targeting, he “never considered rerouting.”

A CNN morning show had a panel of guests from all over the world, giving them an opportunity to share perspectives from those locations, including CNN international correspondent Will Ripley reporting from Beijing that there is “increasing concern that an accidental war could break out on the Korean Peninsula,” CNN international correspondent Alexandria Fields reporting that people in South Korea “know that a war of words can lead to a mistake and that’s the fear; that’s the fear and that’s what can cause conflict… You’ve got more than 20 million people in the wider Seoul metropolitan area.” CNN military and diplomatic analyst Rear Admiral John Kirby offered his perspective that “when the president reacts the way he does, he reinforces Kim’s propaganda that it is about the United States and regime change. He’s actually working to isolate us rather than North Korea from the international community.”



Vox on Fox; used TV News Archive data used to reveal shift in “Fox & Friends”

Vox reporter Alvin Chang used closed captioning data of “Fox & Friends” from the TV News Archive for his analysis showing that “the program is in something of a feedback loop with the president.” He spoke about his work on CNN, saying hosts of the Fox show “seem to know that the president is listening” and “instruct or advise the president, and they’ve done it increasingly more since his election.”



Fact-check: US nuclear arsenal now stronger than ever before because of the president’s actions (false)

On Wednesday, President Trump tweeted, “My first order as president was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before.”

“False,” reported PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson, writing, “[T]his wasn’t Trump’s first order as president” and his executive order was “not unusual.” He quoted Harvard nuclear-policy expert, Matthew Bunn: “There is a total of nothing that has changed substantially about the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the few months that Trump has been in office. We have the same missiles and bombers, with the same nuclear weapons, that we had before.”

Over at FactCheck.org, Eugene Kiely quoted Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists: “The renovation and modernization of the arsenal that is going on now is all the result of decisions that were made by the Obama administration,’ ”

Glenn Kessler reported for the Washington Post’s Fact Checker that the president’s tweet was “misleading Americans” and gave him “four Pinocchios.”

Fact-check: American workers were left behind after “buy American steel” bill failed (spins the facts)

In the Democratic weekly address, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D., Wis., said, “My Buy America reform passed the Senate with bipartisan support. But when it got to the House, the foreign steel companies bought Washington lobbyists to kill it. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell gave them what they wanted, and American workers were left behind again.”

“Baldwin’s bill would have required U.S. steel to be used on projects funded by the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund. It didn’t pass, but a separate provision in a water infrastructure bill that became law last year does exactly that for fiscal 2017. In fact, Congress has imposed the same buy American provision for drinking water projects every year since fiscal 2014,” reported Eugene Kiely for FactCheck.org.

Fact-checkers have been busy checking recent Trump comments, including these from W. Virginia and  Youngstown, OH rallies, and the speech he gave to the Boy Scouts.

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