Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Content creators find a place in newsrooms
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
Sept. 2, 2020, 2:15 p.m.
Aggregation & Discovery
LINK: tvnews.stanford.edu  ➚   |   Posted by: Hanaa' Tameez   |   September 2, 2020

While the use of local TV for news is declining, cable news is growing: Audience and revenue for Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN are all up this year. So which stories, and people, are getting the most airtime? Thanks to the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, anyone can query “the amount of time people appear and the amount of time words are heard in cable TV news.”

The tool uses “deep-learning-based image and audio analysis processing techniques” to pull from more than 270,000 hours of programming and commercial segments from Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, dating back to January 1, 2010 and updating daily. “Computer vision is used to detect faces, identify public figures, and estimate characteristics such as gender to examine news coverage patterns. To facilitate topic analysis the transcripts are time-aligned with video content, and compared across dates, times of day and programs,” Geraldine Moriba, a journalist and filmmaker and 2019 JSK journalism fellow, explained on Medium. People can use the tool answer questions like “How much coverage does Trump receive compared to Biden? How did this change when coronavirus and the George Floyd protests came into the picture?” (There’s more on the methodology, and some findings, here.)

The tool helps “increase transparency around daily editorial choices,” Moriba noted. “How long are certain people on the screen? How often are certain words mentioned? What will you find when you compare these measurements across time, channel, and programs?”

The tool was created by the Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford University in collaboration with the John S. Knight Fellowship Program, with support from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Intel, Google, Amazon, and the National Science Foundation. The video dataset is from the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive.

Here are some of the queries people have run so far:

Check out the Cable TV News Analyzer here.

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Content creators find a place in newsrooms
“Ask someone in your life under 40 where they get the news. Odds are they’ll mention a non-newsroom podcaster or YouTuber.”
Media owners will protect the powerful
“To be clear, many within these organizations have already shown a willingness to hold back in favor of access to political elites — so these actions by owners and CEOs will be more of an alignment of goals than a top-down push.”
Visual investigations become a mainstay of news
“Visual investigations are poised to move from niche desks to standard operating procedure in newsrooms in 2025.”