Tag Archives: The Atlantic

A Year-end Message from the TV News Archive

by Katie Donnelly

Over the past extremely unpredictable election year, the Internet Archive invented new methods and tools to give journalists, researchers, and the public the power to access, scrutinize, share, and thoroughly fact-check political ads, presidential debates, and TV news broadcasts.

Our efforts were designed to help citizens better understand the patterns of political messages designed to persuade them and find factual, reliable information in what is disturbingly being seen as a “post-truth” world.

The Political TV Ad Archive project proved to be highly useful to our high-profile fact-checking partners, as well as reporters at an array of outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, FOX News, The Economist, The Atlantic, and more. By providing data about when, where, and how many times political ads aired on TV in key markets, the project unlocked new creative potential for data reporters to analyze how campaigns and outside groups were targeting messages to voters in different locations.

Breaking events, like political debates and speeches, also offered a chance for archived TV content to shine, allowing reporters to isolate and share clips in near-real time, and fact-checkers to harvest dubious statements for further exploration. In addition, the project’s experience with developing audio fingerprinting (through a new invention we call the Duplitron) for identifying instances of ads inspired a new use: tracking candidate debate sound bites in subsequent TV news shows.

In this way, reporters and researchers were able to analyze and report on which political statements were trending across different TV programs. This provided a way to show how political statements were trending across various networks, revealing the ideological, and agenda-setting and other editorial choices made by news producers about what issues to highlight and overlook.

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As Roger Macdonald, director of the TV News Archive, wrote to project partners: “Citizens will increasingly hunger for sound information to inform wise electoral decisions. With our Republic being riven by increasing socio-political chaos and infectious divisions, whose magnitude has not been seen since before our Civil War, we think there are uncommon opportunities to serve citizens with the information for which they will increasingly yearn. We have an historic opportunity to thoughtfully place some grains of sand on the balance pan of reason.”

The project was supported by a generous grant from the Knight News Challenge, funded in partnership with the Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the Hewlett Foundation and the Rita Allen Foundation, and received additional support from the Rita Allen Foundation, the Democracy Fund, PLCB Foundation, Craig Newmark, Christopher Buck, and others

Here is a quick look at project accomplishments:

Political TV Ad Archive

  • Total number of archived ad views, most embedded in partner sites: 2,036,063
  • Number of ads collected: 2,991
  • Political ads broadcast 364,822 times over 26 markets
  • Number of fact and source checks: 131
  • Press coverage: 156 articles

Katie Donnelly is associate director at Dot Connectors Studio, a Philadelphia-based strategy firm that has worked with the Political TV Ad Archive.

New Research Tool for Visualizing Two Million Hours of Television News

Guest post by Kalev Leetaru

Today the Internet Archive announces a new interactive timeline visualization–the Television Explorer–that lets you trace how any keyword–think “emails”, “tax returns”, “alt-right”–has been covered on U.S. television news over the past half-decade.

See the Television Explorer, a new tool for exploring TV News.

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Over the past year and a half, the GDELT Project and the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive have worked closely together to visualize how U.S. television news has covered the contentious 2016 political campaign.

One of the tools we created was the 2016 Candidate Television Tracker, which used closed captioning to count how many times each of the presidential candidates was mentioned on television and offered a day-by-day timeline showing the ebbs and flows of who was “winning” the free media wars. (Answer: President-elect Donald Trump.) This tool was used by such media outlets as The Atlantic, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, Politico and The Guardian, among many others.

Now we are adapting this tool to allow more sophisticated searches: rather than just the presidential candidates, now you can trace television news coverage of any keyword of your choosing. You can even run advanced searches that find words in conjunction with other works or phrases, such as finding mentions of Hillary Clinton that also discuss her email server. All search results are available for download via CSV and JSON export, making it possible for data journalists, researchers, and advocates to fine tune their analysis of the data.

When searching, you get back a visual timeline showing how often that word or phrase has appeared on American television news over the past half-decade. Nearly two million hours of television news totaling more than 5.7 billion words from over 150 distinct stations spanning July 2009 to present (though not all stations were monitored for the entire period) are searchable in this interface.

Unlike the Internet Archive’s Television New Archive interface, which returns results at the level of an hour or half-hour “show,” the interface here reaches inside of those six and a half years of programming and breaks the more than one million shows into individual sentences and counts how many of those sentences contain your keyword of interest. Instead of reporting that CNN had 24 hour-long shows yesterday that mentioned Donald Trump one or more times, the interface here will count how many sentences uttered on CNN yesterday mentioned his name–a vastly more accurate metric for assessing media attention.

Explore how CNN covered the presidential campaign of 2012 versus 2016 and understand just how big of a media event this year’s election really was. See precisely when Edward Snowden burst onto the scene and how Wikileaks got more coverage during the 2016 presidential election than its debut in 2010. Watch the seasonal spikes of Thanksgiving, or see how ebola received little attention, even as thousands died in Africa, becoming a topic only after the first Americans became infected.

Using the “near” search feature, plot coverage of Wikileaks that also mentioned either “Podesta,” “email,” or “emails” nearby and discover that FOX paid far more attention to the DNC and Podesta email hacks than CNN, MSNBC, CNBC or Bloomberg. In contrast, CNN focused more intensely on the Trayvon Martin shooting (Aljazeera America and Bloomberg were not yet being monitored by the Archive), while Aljazeera led coverage of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner deaths.

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Search of term “Wikileaks” near Podesta, emails, Clinton

Search for “ivory” to see that Aljazeera America (which ceased operation in April 2016) devoted vastly more of its coverage to elephant poaching in Africa than any other monitored national network. It also paid the most attention to “Africa” and to the “refugee” crisis. On the other hand, Bloomberg has devoted much more of its time to “China” and to the economic crisis in “Greece” last year.

We look forward to seeing what people do with this new tool Please share your favorite searches on Twitter with the hashtag “#internetarchivetvsearch”. If you have any questions, please email kalev.leetaru5@gmail.com or nancyw@archive.org.

Kalev Leetaru is an independent data journalist.