Tag Archives: Third Eye

TV News Record: The year in TV news visualizations

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Thanks for being part of our community at the TV News Archive. As 2017 draws to a close, we’ve chosen six of our favorite visualizations using TV News Archive data. We look forward to assisting many more journalists and researchers in what will likely be an even more tumultuous news year. 

The New York Times: Mueller indictments

The New York Times editorial page used our Third Eye chyron collection to produce an analysis of TV news coverage of major indictments of Trump campaign officials by special counsel Robert Mueller: “The way each network covered the story – or avoided it – is a sign of how the media landscape has become ever more politicized in the Trump era. ”

credit: Taylor Adams, Jessia Ma, and Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times, “Trump Loves Fox & Friends,” November 1, 2017.

FiveThirtyEight: hurricane coverage

Writing for FiveThirtyEight.com, Dhrumil Mehta demonstrated that TV news broadcasters paid less attention to Puerto Rico’s hurricane Maria 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.

credit: Dhrumil Mehta, “The Media Really Has Neglected Puerto Rico,” FiveThirtyEight, September 28, 2017.

TV News Archive: face-time for lawmakers

Using our Face-o-Matic data set, we found that Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., gets the most face-time on cable TV news, and MSNBC features his visage more than the other networks examined. Fox News features the face of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., more than any other cable network.

Vox:  Mueller’s credibility

Vox’s Alvin Chang used Television Explorer to explore how Fox News reports on Mueller’s credibility. This included showing how often Fox news mentioned Mueller in the context of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Alvin Chang, “A week of Fox News transcripts shows how they began questioning Mueller’s credibility,” Vox, October 31, 2017.

The Trace: coverage of shootings

Writing for The Trace, Jennifer Mascia presented findings from Television Explorer showing how coverage of shootings declines rapidly: “Two days after 26 people were massacred in a Texas church, the incident — one of the worst mass shootings in American history — had nearly vanished from the major cable news networks.”

Credit: Jennifer Mascia, “Data Shows Shrinking Cable News Cycles for This Fall’s Mass Shootings,” The Trace, December 5, 2017.

The Washington Post: What TV news networks covered in 2017

Philip Bump of The Washington Post crunched Television Explorer data to look at coverage of eleven major news stories by five national news networks. Here’s his visualization of TV news coverage of “sexual assault,” which shows how coverage increased at the end of the year as dozens of prominent men in media, politics, and entertainment were accused of sexual harassment or assault.

Philip Bump, “What national news networks were talking about during 2017, The Washington Post, December 15, 2017.

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

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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

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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

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  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.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.

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 Trump, US 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: Wayback Machine saves deleted prez tweets

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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 chyron data provide ways to explore breaking news reports & bias

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Today the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive announces a new way to plumb our TV news collections to see how news stories are reported: data feeds for the news that appears as chyrons on the lower thirds of TV screens.  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.  At launch, Third Eye tracks BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and contains more than four million chyrons captured in just over two weeks.

Download Third Eye data. API and TSV options available.

Follow Third Eye on Twitter.

Third Eye joins a growing suite of TV News Archive tools that help researchers, journalists, and the public analyze how news is filtered through TV and presented to the public. These include Face-o-Matic, created through a partnership with Matroid, which uses facial recognition to find top political leaders on TV news shows; and Television Explorer, an interface created by data scientist Kalev Leetaru that allows easy searching and visualization of TV News Archive closed captioning. The Political TV Ad Archive used audio fingerprinting to find airings of political ads in the 2016 elections, and the Trump and U.S. Congress archives provide a quick way to see news clips featuring top political figures, alongside associated fact checks by FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker.

Breaking news often appears as chyrons on TV before newscasters begin reporting or video is available, whether the subject is a hurricane or a breaking political story. Which chyrons a TV news network chooses to display often reveals editorial decisions that can demonstrate a particular slant on the news. With Third Eye data, investigations by journalists, fact-checkers, researchers, can explore how messages are delivered to the public in near real-time.

Third Eye on Twitter tweets the most clear, representative chyron from a one-minute period on a particular TV news channel. This can serve as an alert system, showing how TV networks are reporting news.

For example, on September 6, 2017, in the midst of a heavy news day featuring Hurricane Irma, the debate over a deal on immigration, and other stories, TV news cable networks began to show the breaking news that Facebook had turned over information about $100,000 in ads purchased by Russian sources during the 2016 elections to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Our Third Eye CNN Twitter bot tweeted out this chyron recorded at 2:38 pm Pacific Standard Time.

Here is the corresponding clip as it appears on the TV News Archive.

At 2:51 p.m., MSNBC ran this chyron: “FACEBOOK: WE SOLD POLITICAL ADS DURING ELECTION TO COMPANY LIKELY OPERATED IN RUSSIA.” The corresponding clip is below.

However, our data do not show Fox News running any chyrons on the Facebook ad news that day. To cross-check, we used Television Explorer, a tool for searching TV News Archive closed captions. (Captions differ from chyrons; captions capture what news anchors are actually saying, as opposed to chyrons, which feature text chosen by the TV channel to run at the bottom of the screen.) Television Explorer shows CNN and MSNBC covering the story on September 6, but not Fox News.

However, the Facebook ad story did make it on to the Fox News website during the 2 p.m. hour, as this search on the Wayback Machine shows.

This is just one example of the way that researchers might use Third Eye chyron data in conjunction with other tools to explore how a particular story is portrayed on TV news. We’d love for others to dig in, explore, and give us feedback on this new public data source.

More on Third Eye data

The work of the Internet Archive’s TV architect Tracey Jaquith, the Third Eye project applies OCR to the “lower thirds” of TV cable news screens to capture the text that appears there. The chyrons are not captions, which provide the text for what people are saying on screen, but rather are narrative display text that accompanies news broadcasts.

Created in real-time by TV news editors, chyrons sometimes include misspellings. The OCR process also frequently adds another element where text is not rendered correctly, leading to entries that may be garbled. To make sense out of the noise, Jaquith applies algorithms that choose the most representative chyrons from each channel collected over 60-second increments. This cleaned-up feed is what fuels the Twitter bots that post which chyrons are appearing on TV news screens.

We provide options to download this filtered feed and/or the raw feed nearly as soon as it appears on the TV screen. Both may be useful depending on the type of project. In addition, the Twitter feed itself is a good source to see what the filtered feed looks like.

Some notes:

  • Chryons are derived in near real-time from the TV News Archive‘s collection of TV news. The constantly updating public collection contains 1.4 million TV news shows, some dating back to 2009.
  • At launch, Third Eye captures four TV cable news channels: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
  • Data can be affected by temporary collection outages, which typically can last minutes or hours, but rarely more. If you are concerned about a specific time gap in a feed and would like to know if it’s the result of an outage, please inquire at tvnews@archive.org.
  • The “raw feed” option provides all of the OCR’ed text from chryons at the rate of approximately one entry per second. The “filtered tweets feed” provides the data that fuels our Twitter bots; this has been filtered to find the most representative, clearest chyrons from a 60-second period, with no more than one entry/tweet per minute (though the duration may be shorter than 60 seconds.) The filtered feed relies on algorithms that are a work in progress; we invite you to share your ideas on how to effectively filter the noise from the raw data.
  • Dates/times are in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) in API feeds, PST (Pacific Standard Time) in tweets.
  • Because the size of the raw data is so large (about 20 megabytes per day), we limit results to seven days per request.
  • We began collecting raw data on August 25, 2017; the filtered feed begins on September 7, 2017.
  • “Duration” column is in seconds–the amount of time that particular chyron appeared on the screen.
  • To view clips in context on the TV News Archive, paste “https://archive.org/details/” before the field that begins with a channel name. For example, “FOXNEWSW_20170919_100000_FOX__Friends/start/792” becomes “https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20170919_100000_FOX__Friends/start/792”

We want to hear from you! Please contact us with questions, feedback, concerns – and also to tell us what project you’ve done with the TV News Archive’s Third Eye project: tvnews@archive.org. Follow us @tvnewsarchive, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Thanks to Robin Chin, Katie Dahl, Dan Schultz, and the TV News Archive director, Roger Macdonald, for contributing to this project.