Tag Archives: TV news archive

Knight Prototype Fund winners use TV News Archive to fight misinformation

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We are delighted to report that two of  20 winners recently announced Knight Prototype Fund’s $1 million challenge to combat misinformation will directly draw on the TV News Archive.

One of these is the Bad Idea Factory’s “Glorious ContextuBot.” Let’s say you come across a tweet that is brandishing a TV news clip to bolster a strong statement on a controversial issue – but you have no idea where or when or whether that clip was aired, by whom, and whether or not it’s legitimate.

The ContextuBot will take the Duplitron 5000, an audio fingerprinting tool developed to track political ads for the Political TV Ad Archive, and build upon it to help users find any relevant TV news coverage of that video snippet. If the video was aired, users will be able to see what came before and after the report.

The team, led by the Dan Schultz, senior creative technologist of the TV News Archive, will bring in veteran media innovators Mark Boas and Laurian Gridnoc of Hyperaudio and Trint. Together they will not only build the ContextuBot, but will also work to improve the speed and accuracy of the Duplitron.

From sticky notes to Glorious Contextubot: on right, Dan Schultz, TV News Archive senior creative technologist, plots prototype plans

Second, Joostware‘s “Who Said What” project will use deep learning algorithms to annotate TV news clips to identify speakers and what they are talking about. Developing this capability will help fact checkers sort through and identify claims by public officials, pundits, and others that bear examination.

We are delighted to work with Joostware as part of our ongoing goal to collaborate with researchers, companies, and others who are exploring how to use Artificial Intelligence tools to draw on the Internet Archive’s collections to enhance journalism and research.

The Knight Prototype Fund will award $50,000 apiece to each of the 20 winners, who are now charged with developing their ideas over the next nine months. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Rita Allen Foundation all support the effort. Winners attended a human-centered design training workshop last week in Phoenix, Arizona, as part of the support offered by the foundations.

 

TV news fact-checked: health care & more + this press briefing will not be televised

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by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman

This week the Senate released its version of health care, so to mark the occasion we offer a trio of recent health care fact checks from The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker. Other fact-checking highlights include: a claim that Saudia Arabia has been spending money on Trump hotels (true, says PolitiFact) and Ivanka Trump asserts American workers have a skill gap (also true, reports Politifact).

But before we present these fact-checks, we pause for a moment to present this commentary from CNN’s Jim Acosta on the White House’s refusal to allow cameras in a growing number of press briefings: “That wouldn’t be tolerated in city council meetings, or at a governor’s press conference,” he noted. “And here we have the representative of the president of the United States saying no you can’t cover it that way….it’s like we’re not even covering a White House anymore…it’s like we’re just covering bad reality television, is what it feels like now.”

Claim: 1.8 million jobs will be lost as a result of the AHCA (two Pinocchios)

Earlier this month, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., said, “Americans will lose their health coverage because of his proposal. And it is a job loser. Estimated to be 1.8 million jobs lost. Donald Trump is a job loser.”

Glenn Kessler reported for the Washington Post’s Fact Checker: “We often warn readers to be wary of job claims made by politicians based on think-tank studies. This is a case in point. Pelosi was careful to say ‘estimated,’ but two groups of researchers, using apparently the same economic model, came up with different estimates of jobs losses under the AHCA by 2022 – 1.8 million and 413,000.”

Claim: the reconciliation process will be used for the AHCA (upside down Pinocchio or flip-flop)

At a recent press briefing, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., described the upcoming legislative process for the American Health Care Act, “Unfortunately, it will have to be a Republicans-only exercise. But we’re working hard to get there.”

Kessler responded that “McConnell’s position has changed, even though he will not acknowledge it. He was against the reconciliation process for health care in 2010; he has embraced it now. He was against secrecy and closed-door dealmaking before; he now oversees the most secretive health-care bill process ever. And he was against voting on a bill that was broadly unpopular — and now he is pushing for a bill even more unpopular than the ACA in 2010.”

Claim: insurers are leaving the health care exchanges because of Obamacare (three Pinocchios)

President Donald Trump talked with Republican senators about health care, saying among other claims, “Insurers are fleeing the market. Last week it was announced that one of the largest insurers is pulling out of Ohio — the great state of Ohio.”

 Kessler wrote that Trump “ignores that many say they are exiting the business because of uncertainty created by the Trump administration, in particular whether it will continue to pay ‘cost-sharing reductions’ to insurance companies. These payments help reduce co-pays and deductibles for low-income patients on the exchanges. Without those subsidies, insurance companies have to foot more of the bill.” 

Claim: Saudi Arabia is spending big on Trump Hotels (mostly true)

The attorney general for the District of Columbia, Karl Racine, said at a recent press conference that “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose government has important business and policy before the president of the United States, has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Trump International Hotel.”

Smitha Rajan reported for PolitiFact, “The Foreign Agent Registration Act report mentions at least one filing which clearly shows that the Saudi government spent $270,000 at the Trump International Hotel for lodging and boarding expenses between October 2016 and March 2017. It’s not clear whether the entire expenses were paid before or after Trump became president. Our research showed it was some of  both.”

Claim: there are 6 million job openings but workers don’t have the skills needed (true)

During a recent interview on Fox & Friends, Ivanka Trump, assistant to the president and daughter of the president, said “There are 6 million available American jobs, so we’re constantly hearing from CEO’s that they have job openings, but they don’t have workers with the skill set they need to fill those jobs.”

For PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson rated her claim “true,” reporting “The number she cites is correct, and she’s right to say that the skills gap plays a role. Economists warn against overestimating the role played by the skills gap in all 6 million job openings, both because other factors play a role (such as the image gap) and because the skills barriers posed are often more modest than having to earn an academic degree or to obtain specialized training.”

TV News Lab: Hyperaudio improving TV news video captioning and sharing

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In a new blog series, TV News Lab, we’ll demonstrate how the Internet Archive is partnering with technology, journalism, and academic organizations to experiment with and improve the TV News Archive, our free, public, online library of TV news shows. Here we interview Mark Boas, founder of the Hyperaudio project, an organization that works to make audio and video more accessible and shareable on the web, by providing an easy-to-use interface for copying and pasting bits of transcripts to create mash ups of shareable video. You can find the open source code powering Hyperaudio on GitHub.

Mark Boas talks to the Internet Archive about Hyperaudio.

NW: What is the problem you’re trying to solve by applying Hyperaudio technology to the TV News Archive?

MB: People find TV news credible. It’s very hard to fake TV news. I’d love to see people using TV news to back up any sort of political or other expression a public official is trying to make, by showing the source material and also the arguments about those statements. I think this also has implications for improving media literacy.

(An example mix made at Chattanooga Public Library.)

NW: What stands in the way of people sharing TV news video right now?

MB:  One of the problems is that audio and video on the web has been a black box in a way. It has not been very well integrated into the web because it’s difficult to do that. If you see a big block of text, it’s easy to highlight, copy, paste and send it off. But if you have an interesting piece of audio to share, how do you do that? There are ways to do it, but it’s not intuitive.

Coupled with that is it’s also hard to find audio on the internet. If you’re searching for search terms, you may or may not find what you want, but only if someone has added sufficient metadata so it’s discoverable. Transcripts allow you to search, but also provide a way to share. And the key to that is that you need not just the transcript, but also you need to match the words in the transcript to the proper times in the audio.

NW: Why is it hard to match the transcript to the audio in a video?

The first step is getting a good quality transcript. It’s great that the TV News Archive uses open captions, but it’s not perfect. (Note: the TV News Archive is searchable via closed captioning, but there’s often a several-second lag between the captions and the video, as well as other quality issues.) The transcript usually needs to be cleaned up. The better the transcript, the better the match. Closed captions are done in real time by humans who make mistakes.

The next challenge is to try and minimize the time it takes to match the words in the transcript to the audio. If we want to automate the process, we need to figure out how to do that more quickly. It’s very intensive on the computing side. I’m experimenting with chunking up the video to speed up the process. I think we’ll see that the matching is an exponential task: a one hour transcript might take 30 minutes and a three hour transcript might take more than three times that. But if we split it up into smaller chunks, the processing might become more efficient

How do people try out Hyperaudio?

Hyperaudio is not a commercial software as a service. It’s more of a demo of the underlying technology. We work with groups like the Studs Terkel Radio Archive (WFMT Chicago), to help them make the most of their content and data; whatever we make flows back into our open source code on GitHub. What we do is very experimental, but it will give you an idea what’s possible. If you want to experiment with TV News Archive, you can do that at http://newsarchive.hyperaud.io/. More info on our experiments and collaborations can be found on our blog.

From Spicer to wiretapping to Sweden: does TV news fuel political rhetoric?

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Cross posted from MediaShift.

A few hours after after Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, compared Syrian President Bashar Assad to Adolf Hitler, saying, “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II…You had … someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” the media speculation began. Where did Spicer get the idea to compare Assad to Hitler?

On Twitter, a liberal blogger named Yashar Ali pointed to a Fox News segment that had aired on April 10, featuring a Skype interview with Kassim Eid, a Syrian activist who has written about surviving an earlier gas attack, seen below on the TV News Archive. Eid said, “He displaced half of the country. He destroyed the country. He gassed women and children. Who can be worse than him? He’s worse than Hitler.”

Ali’s tweet was picked up later that afternoon by NJ.com in a report about the social media criticism following Spicer’s statement. At 4:50 p.m., Charlie Warzel, a reporter for BuzzFeed, posted a piece hypothesizing that the Fox Business News interview might have been the inspiration for Spicer’s statement.

Of course only Spicer himself knows if the Fox News report inspired his statement, which he eventually apologized for after several hours of harsh criticism. After all, he is certainly not the first public official to run into trouble when making statements about Hitler.
In an era where news no longer solely arrives on newsprint on front doorsteps, tracing the provenance of a statement, idea, story, or report across media platforms–social media, television, news websites–has become a common pursuit. This has been, perhaps, fueled by the president, who has made such references himself.

As a library, the Internet Archive can help. Our Wayback Machine preserves websites online, with more than 286 million websites saved overtime. And our TV News Archive provides an online, public library with 1.3 million shows and counting. Here we have the original source for many types of statements by public officials: news conferences, appearances before congressional committees, appearances on TV news shows, and more. The 60-second segment format allows for editing your own clips up to three minutes long and makes them shareable on social media and embeddable on websites.

For example, in February, Trump made a reference at a Florida rally about Sweden: “Look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.” Fact- checkers reported that nothing had happened in Sweden the night before.

Trump later tweeted, however, that his statement about Swedish problems was inspired by Fox News report.

In that report, Fox showed an interview by a Swedish film maker, Ami Horowitz, who asserts that refugees are responsible for “an absolute surge in both gun violence and rape in Sweden once they began this open door policy.”

Robert Farley, a reporter for FactCheck.org, wrote that this claim is contested by “Swedish authorities and criminologists.”

Several weeks later, Trump credited a “talented legal mind” on Fox news as the source for his March 2017 tweet accusing former President Barack Obama ordering wiretapping of Trump tower during the presidential election.

Following Trump’s statement, Shepard Smith, chief news anchor for Fox News, said that “Fox News cannot confirm Judge Napalitano’s commentary. Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the president of the united states was surveilled at any time in any way, full stop.”

The question of how political rhetoric travels across media platforms goes far beyond the Trump administration. Media researchers are developing methodologies to track messages and stories as they travel across the news ecosphere. Understanding these phenomenon is essential in figuring out effective ways to improve overall media literacy and fight the spread of misinformation.

As an early experiment in making such research easier, we’ve been developing hand-curated collections of statements by public officials, starting with the Trump Archive and now branching out to creating archives (still in development) for the congressional leadership on both sides of the party aisle: Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky.; Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D., N.Y.; House Speaker Paul Ryan, R., Wis., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif.

We’re working now to develop partnerships to use machine learning approaches, such as speaker identification and natural language processing, to make our resources more useful for researchers. Ultimately, we’ll improve search to make it simpler to search across our different collections and types of media.

TV news highlights: overtime pay, Middle East, murder rate and more

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by Katie Dahl

President Donald Trump addressed Congress for the first time this week and the Democratic National Committee elected a new chair, Thomas Perez. Here are five claims our fact-checking partners examined this week, paired with corresponding clips from the Trump Archive and the TV News Archive.

Claim: Trump wants to eliminate overtime pay for people (mostly false)

In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, newly elected Democratic National Committee Chair Thomas Perez said, “Donald Trump wants to eliminate overtime pay for people.” PolitiFact’s Allison Graves hadn’t heard that one before, so she looked into it and found that while Trump “has not talked about eliminating overtime pay, he has supported rolling back an Obama-era regulation that would expand the number of people eligible for overtime.” Robert Farley from FactCheck.org confirmed with the DNC’s press office that “Perez was referring to the overtime rule proposed by President Barack Obama (while Perez was the labor secretary), and the possibility that Trump may squash it.” But Farley says “[v]iewers of NBC’s Meet the Press on Feb. 26 were left with the false impression from Perez that Trump wants to do away with federal overtime pay requirements altogether. And there is no evidence Trump wants to do that.”

Claim: Murder rate increase fastest in nearly half century (basically correct)

In his first address to Congress, President Trump claimed that the 2015 murder rate “experienced its largest single-year increase in nearly half a century,” and that in “Chicago, more than 4,000 people were shot last year alone.” Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman found for PolitiFact that “FBI data shows a clear spike in homicides between 2014 and 2015–a 10.8 percent increase. This does rank as the biggest year-to-year jump in murders since 1970-71, when the number rose by 11.1 percent.” The Washington Post fact-checkers Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee agreed, but wrote “overall, violent crime is on a decades-long decline… This is why criminologists do not make generalizations about crime trends based on short-term comparisons of rates, such as annual or monthly changes.” FactCheck.org’s Farley reported similar data, saying the murder rate “did go up by 10.8 percent from 2014 to 2015, the long-term trend has been a decrease in murders. The 2015 rate, 4.9 per 100,000 people, is less than half the peak rate of 10.2 in 1980, according to FBI data.” Trump’s Chicago statistics are also correct, say Jacobson and Sherman. According “to data released by the Chicago Police Department shortly after the close of 2016, the city had 762 murders, 3,550 shooting incidents, and 4,331 shooting victims in 2016.”

Claim: NATO partners aren’t meeting their financial obligations (true)

Continuing a familiar campaign talking point, President Trump said that our NATO partners “must meet their financial obligations,” and went on to claim that because of his “very strong and frank discussions… the money is pouring in.” Jacobson and Sherman found that yes “only a handful of NATO’s 28 members have fulfilled the pledge to spend at least 2 percent of their economy on defense — Great Britain, the United States, Greece and Estonia.” Kessler and Lee, though, wrote that the comment about the money pouring in is a “bit nonsensical,” presumably because “the money would not be going to the United States or even necessarily to NATO; this is money that countries would spend to bolster their own military forces.”

Claim: Defense budget one of the biggest increases in history (mostly false)

In touting his budget proposal, President Trump said it “calls for one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.” Sherman and Jacobson looked at just the last 30 years and found “there have been 10 years when the base defense budget has gone up by more than what Trump has requested. In some years, the increase was more than double Trump’s.” The defense analysts they talked with “confirmed that while the proposal is a significant increase, it is not remarkable.” They rated the statement Mostly False.

Claim: We’ve spent $6 trillion dollars in the Middle East (not correct)

President Trump told Congress that “America has spent approximately $6 trillion dollars in the Middle East,” but fact-checkers indicate he’s off by some trillions. Robert Farley reported the number is $1.7 trillion: “In a report released this month, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said that the Department of Defense estimates that the U.S. has spent $1.7 trillion on ‘war-related activities’ from 2001 through Sept. 30, 2016. That includes military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya.” The PolitiFact reporters wrote “he is confusing money that’s been spent with money that researchers say will be spent,” and The Washington Post’s agreed, writing the “$6 trillion figure adds in estimates of future spending, such as interest on the debt and veterans care for the next three decades.”

Read here about tips to use  the Trump Archive. To receive the TV News Archive’s email newsletter, subscribe here.

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

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by Katie Dahl

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

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

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

Fact-checking in the Trump Archive

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

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

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

Search the Trump Archive

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

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

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

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

Browse the Trump Archive by TV show

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

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

Make your own shareable TV clips

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

This week’s TV news highlights with fact checks

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by Katie Dahl

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

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

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

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

Claim: Sanctuary cities breed crime (no evidence)

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Year-end Message from the TV News Archive

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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.

screenshot-2016-12-19-13-21-14

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

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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. 

How the Internet Archive is hacking the election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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