I'm Kathy Kiley. I am an editor at Bloomberg Politics. I am
also a member of the National
Press Club, and I am a director of the National Press Club's Institute
for Journalism. Now,
I think a lot of people I know for our TV audience
have heard of the National Press
Club. You might think of it as a place where you hear very interesting luncheon
speakers or a place where journalists gather after deadline to exercise our
elbows. And those are both very venerable traditions that I long may they reign,
but it's also a place where journalists gather to help each other sharpen our
skills and add to our toolboxes.
And that is where the National Press Club's Institute for Journalism comes in. We
are the nonprofit wing of the National Press Club, and we put on programs like
this. We do depend on the kindness of friends and strangers, so when you're
thinking about making a charitable donation, you might add us to our list. Even
if you don't know a journalist or are not a journalist, you should care because
we think that a free press supports a free society.
And on that note, I'd really like to celebrate and share, for
those of you who don't already know, the news that Jason Rezaian is headed back
to the United States. And that is a goal that many people at the National Press
Club helped to press for, and so we're very delighted, especially our
Committee for the Freedom of the Press, which is also a part of the National
Institute, the National Press Club's Institute for Journalism.
Now today's program, which is part of a wonderful journalism education series
that Julie Hsu, our director, puts together, is really interesting to me as a
political junkie. It is, we live in a society, as I think we all know, where
an awful lot of money is spent to influence the outcomes of elections.
And much of that money goes to mass communications of various sorts. This project
helps people to decode those messages and, in some cases, to
trace the messages back to the messengers, which, as those of us in this room,
this is a very distinguished panel of political journalists and investigators,
and we all know that sometimes that's not so obvious. So this is also a wonderful
collaboration of journalists and technologists, journalists
and engineers, to help to combine talents and resources
to take these messages and turn them into data. And when you can turn
propaganda into data, you can sort it, you can manipulate it,
and you can help people see patterns that they might not have otherwise seen. So
this is really important work. It's very arduous work, and it's being done by
some really, really smart people. And as a journalist, I'm really humbled by the
technologists who have joined in this effort. So with that, I'll turn it over to
Roger from the Internet Archive, which, like the National Press Club, does a lot
more things than what it's best known for, which is probably the way back machine
and putting the Grateful Dead online.
[...] Ebert Thank you very much. Great to be here with you. And as Kathy said
about Humble, we are librarians. We are technologists, and we are humbled to be
here with you and our journalists and other investigative partners.
We're at the Internet Archive. It's the largest public digital library in
the world at archive.org.
We archive the web and have billions of pages available to look back in time. We
have software, we have books, and we have television. We're recording a great
deal of television, foreign and domestic, and about three and a half years opened
up a television news research library.
We repurposed the closed captioning to use as a search index to allow people to
compare and contrast and quote and borrow television news. In order to
explore television news,
we've opened up an additional element of television for
inspection, and that are political ads.
We do live in this era where there's an enormous amount of money being poured
into political advertising. The public and journalists and scholars and civic
organizations that serve the public having to make these hard choices have a hard
time being able to understand and convey what the larger meaning is of this
messaging and the money behind the messaging.
And as librarians, we're hoping to provide some opportunity to treat media as
data and study at scale and in the individual moments
these kinds of media. In this election year, we're particularly amazed to
be joining you all in being amazed at how so much of the equation of the
relationship between paid media, political advertising, and earned media, the
coverage that's given in all forms of media, has been upended. Where
there's an enormous amount of ... Trump has gotten enormous amount of press
attention without spending any money on political advertising, television
political advertising. Now that he has in the last two and a half weeks, we can
track those effects as well.
So today, we're here to flip the switch, to open up politicaladdarchive.org. It
is a project of the Internet Archive. We are tracking political ads in key early
primary states and key markets in those states. We utilize audio fingerprinting
to identify political ads and look for them throughout all of TV.
We surface television news and you can see the context in which political ads
occur in television news through our site. We also track political ads in
entertainment and other programming. We don't surface that for inspection out of
respect for the broadcasters, whereas we think news is very tightly coupled to
open public interest access.
This politicaladdarchive, we track individual ads. We
give you information about the [... ] action, about who's the sponsor of the ad.
We dynamically link to organizations like Open Secrets that does fantastic
research on who's behind, who's behind, who's behind the political action
committee and the various other flavors of sponsors who wrap, who's behind, who's
behind in multiple layers of obfuscation.
One of the reasons why we're using audio fingerprinting is
because most, it seems, most of the political ads are not captioned. We did an
experimental study in the Philadelphia Television Market area during the fall
elections in 2014 and found 70% of the political ads there were not captioned,
which is a curious byproduct of the old school media, the media mentality
of people who are creating advertising because obviously there's no politician in
the world who would say, look, I'm going to spend a lot of money on this, but I
want to make sure to exclude those who have difficult time hearing. And we're
going to exclude people in health clubs and in bars. Can we do that? Yeah, you
can. So it's amazing that we've reached this juncture and there's a wonderful
public policy opportunity for the parties to get together and go, you know, guys,
we're going to make all our messaging accessible, but it's not. So we're using
audio fingerprinting to detect these ads. It detects the ads as they are played
in paid advertising slots. It also detects ads that are, that
appear in news. And once again, we have this opportunity to provide tools for
researchers to study this earned media where their messaging is
inserted within the news program, or I mean, is part of the stories within news
programs, which we're seeing a lot of, which is fairly exceptional. We're
supported by the Knight Foundation, a Knight News Challenge, a collaboration
between the Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, Rita Allen Foundation, and the
Hewlett Foundation. The Democracy Fund has also funded outreach and training for
journalists with our partners. And rather than going over in a great meal more
detail than I want to do, I just wanted to say that we are, as I said at the
outset, we're librarians and engineers working together to serve the public. So
here today and ongoing, we need to hear from you all about what we can do to
serve your interests and to serve your imaginations. Because what we're doing
today, having flipped this switch on politicaladsarchive.org, is open a door,
open a door to imagination and thoughtful inquiry and research.
Thanks, Roger, for the overview. We're going to turn, we have a wonderful group
of partners here who are working with us to make this project, give it a lot
more depth and resonance.
And they're all going to talk a little bit about what they're observing in the
election and what we hope to document on the new website, which is
politicaladsarchive.org, live today.
And first up is Robert McGuire. He has the title of Political Nonprofit
Investigator at the Center for Responsive Politics. The Center for Responsive
Politics is a wonderful, wonderful resource, opensecrets.org, where they gather
together all kinds of information about who's contributing to campaigns and
investigate the connections between those groups. So Robert, if you'd like to
talk a little bit about the work you're doing, that would be great.
First of all, thank you so much to the Internet Archive for having us here today.
This is really exciting. We are particularly excited about partnering with the
Internet Archive on this because finding out who is running ads, when they're
running ads, how often they're running ads is such a crucial part, not only of,
you know, understanding the election as a whole, but in particular the area that
I work in, which is dark money. So the Center for Responsive Politics, for those
who aren't familiar, we're a nonpartisan, partisan nonprofit organization, who we
deal mostly in data, so lobbying data, campaign finance data. I'm going to focus
specifically on dark money, and this is the way we refer to group
501c organizations, particularly social welfare organizations and trade
associations, spending an increasing amount of money in elections without
disclosing the sources of the funding.
So for example, in 2006 we had about $5 million, $5.5 million spent by these
kinds of organizations that grew to more than $300 million in the last
presidential election. And then on top of that you have an additional hundred
million or so, hundreds of millions, that is spent outside of windows that have
to be reported to the Federal Election Commission. And that is where this kind of
information is absolutely crucial. To that end, we work with the Wesley Media
Project on reports about who's spending when, how many ads they're running. We
work with the Internet Archive to try and do the same thing. We are processing
Federal Communications Commission data to process and link
filings up to the particular groups, standardize those groups so that people can,
you know, we get calls all the time saying, this group is running ads on my TV,
they're telling me to vote for somebody, or they're insinuating that I should
vote for someone. But I don't see them on your
website. We're trying to make that possible.
We're basically trying to do everything we possibly can to give people access to
the information they need. And just in the last few minutes I'm going to
highlight two stories where ads were crucial. In October we reported on a group
called Carolina Rising. They spent effectively 100 percent of their money
supporting a single candidate, Tom Tillis, who ended up unseating the incumbent
Democrat in North Carolina. The group did so without reporting any of its donors.
And we were able to use both FEC, Federal Election Commission data, and Federal
Communications data to show, you know, this is the ad, these are the ads that
they reported. This is the total amount spent. But we can point to these ads and
show that they were quite active before they started reporting to the commission.
The same is true for a report we put out yesterday about a group called
Oklahomans for a Conservative Future. This group was run by political operatives.
It was started weeks before the candidate it supported was – made his
announcement that he was going to run for office. It spent between 1.3 and 1.6
million trying to get this guy elected. He failed. And then they essentially sent
an IOU to the IRS saying, OK, we know we didn't – we spent a lot of money on
politics, but we promise we'll do better next year, which isn't actually a legal
argument and doesn't hold water. The question now is whether the FEC or IRS will
ever do anything about that, and that is very much an open question. So these two
examples are showing a trend not only of, you know, we have increasing political
activity from groups that don't disclose their donors, but these groups are
becoming a part of the campaigns themselves. This is what's particularly
worrisome, is that these are supposed to be apolitical organizations, but they're
actually a sort of non-disclosing extension of the campaign. So, for example,
Conservative Solutions Project in this cycle has spent about $8 million
supporting Marco Rubio. Of course, they haven't reported any of that to the
Federal Election Commission. What they've done is they've framed all of the ads
as educational ads. They want to talk about the Iran
deal. They want to talk about taxes.
But they only want to talk about it as it relates to Marco Rubio and how stellar
his decision-making has been on all of these issues. Or, in my favorite example,
they talk about Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, and at the end of the ad it says
something along the lines of support Marco Rubio and big letters, and then
underneath in small letters it says, and Mike Lee, and gives their phone numbers.
So this is something that is going to be a moving target the whole cycle. It's
going to be really difficult for us to... We're going to get the data to people,
but it's not easy. But we're hoping that this partnership with Internet Archive
is going to make that a lot easier.
Thank you. We are, too. We all are kind of hoping that the archive project will
surface an ad by a cure-to-for unheard-of organization, which then we can tell
Open Secrets about, and they'll run out and investigate it. And we'll get that
information up there, as will they and all of us, really.
So next I'd like to introduce Dave Leventhal. He's a senior political reporter
for the Center for Public Integrity, a Pulitzer Prize-winning organization where
they investigate many things among the money and politics, and they have a really
great program this election called Source Check. And I believe
you're going to talk a little bit more about that.
Absolutely. Well, thanks for being here. And of course, you might be out there, a
voter in Iowa, or perhaps a voter in New Hampshire, where the first caucus and
primary are showing up, or South Carolina, Nevada, some of the early states. And
you sit down tonight, you turn on Wheel of Fortune with the Colbert Show or Jimmy
Fallon, and then it goes to a commercial break, and you see another political
advertisement. And it has the same hallmarks as all the rest, ominous music and
dark shadowy figures. And at the end of it, it lists a name that you don't
recognize. And it might be a name that's only slightly less ridiculous than
Americans for Hamburgers or Citizens for Unicorns. And you're wondering, well,
what is this group? So you go, like anyone would, to Google, and you type in the
name of the organization, if you can even catch it in the midst of the
advertisement, and you don't find much about them. Maybe a name of the
organization, and a couple of news articles about what they've done here in a
certain television market or there in another television market, but not a whole
lot about who's behind them, or what they want. But you know that certainly in
their advertisements that you're seeing day in and day out, that they're very,
very much against Hillary Clinton, or against Jeb Bush, or against Donald Trump,
or any of the other candidates who are running in the presidential race. And then
you wonder, well, all right, what do they want? What's their point?
What are they trying to get at?
Why are they trying to influence this election that I'm soon going to be voting
in that could very much change the trajectory of the entire presidential race? So
at the Center for Public Integrity, we're a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative
news organization. We've launched a project for 2016 called Buying of the
President 2016. And as Nancy mentioned, one key element of this project is called
Source Check, which is going to be an effort to look at all of these different
advertisements to the extent that we can and dig deep on them. Try to find out
truly who are the people behind these advertisements, where the money is coming
from behind these advertisements, and ultimately try to answer the question,
well, what interests do these groups, which you have so little information about,
have in trying to support one candidate over another, or certainly, as many, many
do, attack the heck out of certain candidates in the race, who are going to be
running against everyone else and competing tooth and nail in all of these early
contests, and then forward from that onto some of the later contests. So as part
of this, we're relying heavily on the Internet Archive, in addition to many, many
other data sources, some of which Robert mentioned, federal sources, Cantor
Media, CMAG, which is an advertising tracking firm, and using this and
amalgamating it in a way that's going to be able to provide real, useful,
accessible journalism to tell those voters, to tell people why this stuff should
matter to them, and truly who these people are behind the ads. We're in an era
right now where oftentimes it's extremely difficult to find out who are behind
these organizations that just simply aren't run by the candidates themselves.
Sure, you have a lot of candidate committees, as they always have in every
election, putting up television advertisements. But ever since a seminal Citizens
United versus Federal Election Commission decision, which celebrated, if you can
call it a celebration somewhat, others wouldn't, its sixth anniversary yesterday,
it has freed in a major way various types of organizations, be them political
groups, or in many cases, nonprofit organizations that shouldn't have a primary
purpose by law of engaging in political activity. It's given them the ability to
nevertheless engage in politics in a major way with millions, even tens of
millions of dollars behind each individual group. So by pouring into these
groups, or boring into these groups, we want to basically educate the public in a
way that, again, is going to be useful when they go and cast their ballot at the
ballot booth or go and caucus in their state. And Robert mentioned one of the
groups that has been very active in the presidential race, a group that's
supporting Marco Rubio, is part of our source check project where we do sort of a
census or a deep dive on the activities of individual groups. We looked at an
environmental group that accepts anonymous contributions, but yet is up with an
ad campaign supporting Bernie Sanders in the presidential race and tried to find
out exactly what they were all about. And more broadly speaking, even going
beyond just television advertisements, you have many organizations, even super
PACs, these groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to
advocate for and against politicians in a race. They're supposed to disclose all
their donors. One of my colleagues who's here today, Michael Beckle, wrote just
an absolutely outrageous piece several months ago about a super PAC, also
purporting to support Bernie Sanders, and yet isn't filing any of its required
paperwork. And it's run by somebody who we revealed had a criminal history and a
very, very, very curious background.
Would encourage you to read this article. And ultimately was able to convince
Daniel Craig, who you may know as the actor who plays James Bond, to make about a
$50,000 donation to this group.
And his publicist was perhaps a little bit surprised to hear all the details
about this group when it came out. So the moral of the story is, as a citizen, as
a voter, as somebody who cares about politics, you need to pay attention to this
stuff, but oftentimes don't have the requisite tools and information to go ahead
and do it. So we want to make sure that you do ultimately do that. And I would
point out one other feature of our reporting this year, which will range from
deep dive investigative stories to these quick hit source check items. We have a
data visualization that was pioneered by another colleague, Chris Zubach, skis
that went up yesterday, relies very heavily on internet archive material in
addition to other sources, and is a very accessible visualization of where these
ads are, who they're sponsored by, where they're going, the information will be
updated constantly every week, and again, provides a way just another way, visual
way, as opposed to a textual way to get this information to absorb it and to act
on it, if you choose to do so. Thanks, Dave. It's all really, really fascinating
stuff. And so we've heard from two organizations that specialize in following the
money trail. And now we have a host of folks who check the facts. So, you know,
one thing of interest that we're trying to gather on the news website, again,
that's political ad archive. org launching today. We are gathering together
information about the facts in the ads, you know, our partner groups who
specialize in is this correct? Is it not correct? Is it kind of correct? Is it
medium correct? And so I'm going to introduce Lori Robertson. She's the managing
editor of fact check.org. And I believe she has something to show you that we'll
start with. Right. Seven out of 10 Americans take prescription drugs. But in the
last seven years, drug prices have doubled. Hillary's going to take on the drug
companies require Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. Let people buy their
prescription drugs from countries like Canada at half the price and cap monthly
prescription costs for every American. The drug companies have been overcharging
long enough. It's time to fight back. I'm Hillary Clinton and I approve this
message. Great. So this is one of the ads that we've fact checked thus far
in this campaign cycle, obviously from the Clinton campaign. And we looked at the
claim in there that drug prices have doubled in the last seven years. The Clinton
campaign pointed to a report by a group called Express Scripts. They're one of
the largest pharmacy benefit managers in the country. When we looked at the
report, it didn't really say what the ad says. It did say that brand name drugs
had more than doubled in the last seven years. But if you continue reading the
report, it also says that more than 80 percent of filled prescriptions are
actually generics and that generic drug prices had declined by about 63 percent
over the same time period.
Unfortunately, the group did not come up with a number that kind of fused the
generic drug prices and the brand name drug prices, at least in terms of how much
consumers are buying. And there in fact is no data that shows overall drug
prices what has happened over the last seven years.
We spoke with an expert as well at the University of Chicago about this.
And we just don't have data on what has happened with overall drug prices. But
obviously, if brand names have gone up more than double and generics have
declined by 63 percent and 80 percent of filled prescriptions are
generics, it was not more than doubling over seven years as the ad says.
In fact, there is some other data on national spending on prescription drugs. The
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services puts out annually a report on national
health care expenditures. And that the drug spending has continued to go up, but
they've found low rates of that growth in spending in recent years. And they've
specifically attributed that to a switch to generic drugs. I think what we
missed the very beginning of that ad where the campaign mentioned
some specific conditions.
They say heart disease, asthma, diabetes, and the report that they point to again
does look a little more specifically at drugs, top 10 drugs
for those specific conditions year over year.
So in looking and that combines both the generics and the brand name drugs. So
looking at those specific conditions year over year for 2014, diabetes was the
only one that saw an increase in overall drug prices and heart disease and asthma
saw a decline. So you know this type of claim is something that we see a lot of
where you know a campaign, I guess a little bit like cherry picking, but I think
the Clinton campaign goes a little beyond cherry picking here and cherry picks
their statistic and then kind of leaves off that this was about brand name drugs.
But we see this a lot where a campaign points to a report as supposed backup for
the claim, but when you go in and actually read the report you find that it did
not really back up what they're saying or had additional information that would
make the claim misleading or add some kind of
information that makes the claim not what it appears to be in the ad.
Thanks Laurie. That's really interesting and yeah it's so true that if you can
link to something people don't necessarily read it right so you get to point out
what's actually in there. So next we're going to have John Greenberg who is staff
writer at PolitiFact and PolitiFact also a Pulitzer Prize
winning organization also sleuthing out the facts and you also have a
video we're going to show. Yeah well let's go for it. This was Trump's first
television ad. I mean Donald Trump right you know him.
I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message. The politicians can pretend it's
something else but Donald Trump calls it radical Islamic terrorism. That's why
he's calling for a temporary shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until
we can figure out what's going on. He'll quickly cut the head off ISIS and take
their oil and he'll stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern
border that Mexico will pay for. We will make America great again.
All right that was quintessential Trump and the part of that ad pretty
scary stuff are those shots of people scurrying over the border
and that's the southern border that Trump says he's going to protect.
So there's just small problem. Small problem. That image comes from Morocco
and it was a number of people crossing the border into a Spanish
enclave on Morocco's border. So you anyone watching this would
presume this is all about America's southern border.
What we found is actually sort of very typical of the kind of ways that
the Trump organization uses information. I won't necessarily call it facts.
This video actually came from 2014.
It was shot or appeared on an Italian broadcast network and
at the time it actually had a location and a time stamp. But like a
lot of information it got detached from those details so that by the time the ad
drifts through YouTube and shows up in the Trump ad it is devoid
of any time stamp or any location. It's just simply there to be used. So we
tracked it down. We pointed this out and rated the whole ad or this part
of the ad pants on fire.
The interesting thing is that the response of the Trump organization at first was
to say well we don't really know where video comes from and then the next day
campaign manager doubles down and says this was one thousand percent on purpose.
We don't care that we were talking about America's southern border and this is a
shot from Morocco. It doesn't matter. We're just trying to make the point. So
we'll give him points for honesty on that point. But what we think is so
important about the whole project now with the Internet Archive and tracking
these political ads is we all know you know the old line from Mark Twain about
you know rumor is halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. So
a political ad particularly in the general campaign may show up in multiple
states. And what we are interested in doing is working through
our partnerships. Our partnerships with NBC News with
Scripps television stations with a number of outfits in Arizona Ohio
Pennsylvania Virginia. These are our affiliates so that we can if we
identify or if one of them identifies a political ad that has a factual error all
of them can be alerted because that ad may show up in their markets and the fact
check would be news to their audience. This is a multiplier effect that allows
us to close the gap between the speed with which a campaign can put an ad out
there and get it to millions of people and then our ability to turn around and
get a corrective message out to many people. We're not going to necessarily reach
millions but we'll be faster and we'll be reaching a lot of them through the
whole network of affiliates and that's why there's a real multiplier effect that
can come through having this resource. Thanks very much. So next we're going to
hear from Michelle Lee who's a reporter with the Washington Post fact checker
also has a video to show. Should I cue that up? Barack Obama released terrorists
from Guantanamo and now they're plotting to attack us. Instead of fighting to
fund our troops he fights to fund Planned Parenthood. He spies on Israel and cut
a deal with Iran. His plan after the attack in San Bernardino take away our guns
and while ISIS is beheading people and burning them in cages he says climate
change is our greatest threat. I'm Marco Rubio. I approved this message because
America needs a real commander in chief and a president who will keep us safe.
So apparently the world is falling apart with the ominous music in the
background. We chose this ad to fact check. I mean we're trying to fact check
as many ads as possible especially right now because you know this is a candidate
speaking directly to the audience with just really ominous music and it's filled
with rhetoric and this is an example of you know a very challenging ad because
it's a series of claim a series of claims with very varying degrees of veracity.
So you know for example yes the US does spy on Israel but the US also spies
on Iran and he didn't say that. So we chose two statements out of that ad to
check that were very fact checkable and are very common GOP talking points and we
wanted to unpack that. So we chose the Guantanamo Bay one where Barack Obama is
releasing terrorists and they're all plotting to attack us and then the other one
where Obama wants to take away our guns and that particularly stood out because
this ad came out either the day of or the day after Obama announced
his executive action on guns.
So it made it sound like that was his plan to take away our guns. So to unpack
those two points the Rubio campaign pointed to statistics on ex Guantanamo
Bay detainees who were confirmed or suspected of re-engaging in terrorist
activities but only six percent of them happened under Obama's term. The rest
were under Bush's term so that was pretty misleading and we a
lot of people point to the Australian buyback program that happened where you
know they took back guns, assault rifles mostly, but the Rubio campaign didn't
actually point to that. They just pointed to Obama's announcement on the
executive action which didn't mention Australian buyback at all. It actually
didn't have a buyback plan and so we noted that while Obama has praised the
Australian buyback program that's not a part of his executive action at all and
this idea that Obama wants to take away our guns you know it's it's rhetoric but
it's not based on actual facts in his plan. So you may know that we rate our
claims on a Pinocchio scale. I think there's a Pinocchio there so it's from zero
to four Pinocchio's four being false and in this case the guns claim was clearly
a four Pinocchio claim. The Guantanamo one was mostly like a two which is like
you know lacks context. You can think of it as half true if you're using the
PolitiFact scale and so we you know evened it out with the three Pinocchio's
which is mostly false. But we're just really excited to partner on this project
because as John said you know it's so important to know about these ads that are
being aired in markets that we're not even aware of. You know at the Fact Checker
it's me and Glenn Kessler. Our entire team is two people and we can't be
everywhere so we rely on our readers a lot. Reader submissions, people sending us
photos of ads that they're getting in their mail, sending us tips about ads that
were airing in their markets and this just helps us be in more places at once.
Thanks Michelle and so I just wanted to flashback.
We have a number of really great partners who are joining us in this effort for
the website we're launching today the Political TV Ad Archive political ad
archive.org and we've heard from some of them some of them aren't here. We newly
joined our efforts are the Duke Reporters Lab out of North Carolina. We have a
bunch of students at the ready who will be looking at the ads we surface and
we'll be fact checking them like crazy. We'll get their information up there and
the American Press Institute who we're also partnering with to do some trainings
thanks to the Democracy Fund and then again you've heard from OpenSecrets.org,
the Center for Public Integrity, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and the Washington
Post Fact Checker. And now we're going to get kind of more into the nuts and
bolts of how we built this project, how we built this site. And there's a small
army of people who are not present in this room who help make this possible and
but I would say at the head of it are a couple people in this room, one of whom
is in the audience but will be around to answer questions and she is Tracy
Jaquith who's the architect of the TV archive at the Internet Archive and unlike
me probably had AV Club and many other things in her college application. And
so she will be available also to speak and then I'm going to introduce Dan Schulz
who is a senior software engineer with us and he has built the back end of this
thing and he's going to talk a little bit more about how he did that
in terms that we can all understand.
I hope so. Thanks, Nancy. So today we've been talking a lot about the content and
the data side of the political ad archive but I want to draw attention to
something that might not be as transparent which is that everything powering this
data set, everything we built and everything we're using is free and open source.
And so we're hoping that a lot of people out there who are excited by the project
will not only use our data but might actually use some of our code and maybe even
contribute back to it because we're continuing to improve it. We built a system
to find copies of known political ads and it's called the dupletron and from
the perspective of a computer there's actually nothing special at all about a
political ad. It's just a piece of video that can be found inside bigger pieces
of video and video is a lot of data so it's kind of slow to find matches.
So this is a process called audio fingerprinting and audio fingerprinting
involves taking a sound, breaking it into thousands of tiny pieces like less than
a second long and then summarizing those pieces. And in the summary process the
trick is that only the most noteworthy and important pieces of that little
snippet get kept. A lot of the noise gets thrown away. And so the reason we do
this is because it's a lot faster and kind of ironically a lot more accurate to
compare summaries of sound than it is to compare the full-blown sound. And that's
what allows us to process millions of minutes of video at a time. So the
collection of all these little summarized pieces is called an audio fingerprint
and we're using a free and open tool called ODD-F Print to do the generation and
to also do some of the exploration. So in practice we get an hour of TV content
from Tracy's pipeline which we then the first thing we do is summarize it into an
audio fingerprint. Then we compare that fingerprint for that hour with all the
fingerprints of the political ads we've seen and registered in our system. And
anytime we find an overlap if that is long enough it gets flagged as a copy of a
political ad and pretty soon that shows up on the political ad archive as an
increased count. And when you download the data you can see the channel, the
markets, the time of airing and the length of the airing as well. As we're moving
forward in this project we're working really hard to make the Duplatron faster
which means we'll be able to process even more content because we're regularly
adding new channels to what this system is watching. And we're also trying to
do a couple things that are pushing the limits of this system which we're hoping
to be able to show off in the coming months. For instance, in
addition to looking for copies of known political ads, we're also capable of
flagging copies of any repeated content whether it's been tagged as special or
not. So this means whenever we see a new political ad that we've never seen
before it's possible to be able to actually surface that to a human and have the
human review it as a potential brand new airing. It's also possible to keep track
of things like sound bites from interviews or sound bites from political speeches
and see how those things are disseminated across the media across the country
right as they're popping out of the woodwork.
So all this is to say please keep an eye on this project in addition to using the
data over the next couple months because we're going to be releasing new features
and if you or anybody you know is interested in collaborating reach out. Thanks.
Thanks Dan. So now I'm going to talk a little bit. I'm Nancy Watzman and I am the
managing editor of this new website politicaladarchive.org. I can be reached
by twitter at at nwatzman or you can reach me by email at nancyw at archive
.org and I'm saying that because I am the person you should bug if you have any
particular questions about the project. I'm going to get into a little bit of the
nuts and bolts of you know how it works and what it looks like. But first back to
the internet archive. Roger spoke a little bit about who we are. Internet Archive
is based in San Francisco in this lovely building which I'm told was bought to
match the logo. It looks like a library. It's a former Christian scientist church
and it's it's actually if you're ever in the neighborhood you should drop by and
visit because they give tours and they have swag you can buy with the logo and
it's a very interesting place to visit.
Has the very modest goal that our organization of archiving all of human
knowledge online for free accessible to all and we're probably best known for the
Wayback Machine. Many journalists are familiar with the Wayback Machine. Lots of
other folks in the general publicist as well. This is a really amazing tool where
you can post in paste in a URL of any website and see a snapshot of the way it
used to be and on a particular date. So I wonder how many people in this room are
you know we're around when the White House dot gov site looked like
this. I do remember it actually.
That was from 1997. So things have changed a bit but we preserve it for all time
on the internet archive. There are so many resources. I mean we actually it's
25 petabytes of data that we have and I'm told that's 15 zeros after the 25.
So it's a lot of stuff and you could spend a lot of time.
One of the really really great resources we have is the TV news broadcast library
and there you can search through closed captioning clips of any news broadcast
back to 2009 and when I first used the site I went immediately to my favorite
quote of all time which is Senator John Corzine former Senator John Corzine who
said when he was called before Congress to talk about MF Global he said mistakes
will continue to happen in the course of human events which is just a wonderful
you know thing you can use around the house as an excuse.
So you can find this clip and what's really wonderful you can't really see it
here it's a little small but you can actually edit this clip you can embed it you
can share it on social media so whether you're a journalist and you want to embed
a quote that you're referring to from a misfigure in your story or you just want
to get something out on Twitter we're there for you and you can find all kinds of
interesting stuff there. So we have a number of things that we are doing for the
2016 primary elections of which the political ad archive is one but there are a
few other things too but well we'll talk about the political ad archive
first so it's data fueled analysis.
Dan talked a little bit about the metadata that we're naturally gathering in the
process of sucking in these tv ads and counting them. We are going to eight
primary states that are key and we are recording 20 markets sifting through 20
markets we've already gone through more than a hundred thousand hours of time to
find these ads and you know that number is just going to get bigger and bigger
and bigger. We're of course starting with Iowa and New Hampshire where we're
gathering ads and we're going to we have this is a graphic on the new website
which will be continually updated to show where the ads are coming from. This is
the way the new website will look when you open it up political ad archive
.org if I haven't said that already.
And when you get in there one thing we are doing it's called we
call it a canonical ad page.
For every ad we discover it's going to get its own web page and you will be able
to see on that web page the video of the ad similar to the tv news broadcast
library it'll be the whole clip and you can edit it embed it do as you wish with
it so you can actually see the ad and then we will be linking to all the great
fact checking and follow the money information that our partners produce on that
web page in one place. But even more we have these data that we get to collect
along the way the actual counts so you know you'll be able to see under the ad
how many times it's aired where and when so it's you know if you go back to the
classic reporting who what why where when we're going to give you who aired the
ad who's targeted in the ad in other words which candidates are mentioned and who
sponsored the ad the name of the group the committee to save puppies or whatever
it is what the ad itself is you can view it and embed it where the ad aired on
which station and in which town or city and when exactly that aired how often it
aired and during what shows and we actually are also using PolitiFact's subject
index to track the subjects covered in the ad and also we're recording the
message of the ad whether it's it's generally a pro ad just entirely pro the
candidate or an entirely against the candidate or whether it's mixed message like
it's saying this candidate is horrible and I'm great or I'm great and this
candidate is horrible or those five candidates are really bad but I'm the best so
we'll have that information too and we're going to be continually adding to that
list of data we're collecting and it's all downloadable in a spreadsheet a CSV
spreadsheet so that you can see again all this information organized sorry or an
API so but what we are we're the library so we are
not interpreting what we're seeing we are presenting it and it's up to you the
public the journalists the researchers to explain what it's about and our
partners of course so that's what we hope when we bring all this information
together we hope that all kinds of things will happen with it that we can't even
anticipate that will bring what we like to say is light to the heat of the
campaign so again it's political ad archive. org launches today it's a growing
resource it's we have more than 30,000 errings of ads now
documented but again it's going to grow and grow it's a living breathing thing so
keep checking in and it's going to get better and better but we also have a few
other tools that we we have that are really useful in analyzing this coming
election and Roger touched on a few of these briefly but we have something
called the um well Caleb Leatrew who is in the audience today
um we work with closely an engineer and a social scientist um and he has
developed something called the candidate name tracker so what this is is it's
using our tv news broadcast data to figure out well how many times does someone
say the word Donald Trump in a tv news show and Hillary Clinton and you know Ben
Carson and so it quantifies that and if you go into this link which you know we
can provide um you can actually you know change it around so you can see you can
see whether it's all data look at the 100 days seven days um and see how their
mentions go up and down with the news um you know this is kind of a good measure
of earned media when a candidate gets a lot of attention in the news for whatever
reason um and it can be really useful like we did this chart right after the
first Trump ad well actually I correct myself the Trump ad on immigration had not
yet aired Trump had simply announced that he was going to spend two million a
week on campaign ads and you could see how his blue line here shot up um just you
know he's a master in getting the earned media so this is a way that you can
track that kind of thing so that can be really useful another thing that Caleb
built and which is wonderful and working with us is um the debate tracker it's
it's um a way to um see which phrases from a particular political debate
were repeated the most on tv news so this is a slide from that first democratic
debate where Bernie Sanders talked about those damn emails and uh you could see
that that shot up that's what that big line is and so that's another way again to
see well not just what was said in the debates but how is that reflected um in
how we consume the news so uh that's the project again this is
my contact information uh political ad archive. org is the website and we hope you
will visit early and often and keep coming back we're also going to have a blog
there where we track a lot of the you know great journalism that comes out about
the ads and we'll get that up there along with our partner information so um i am
now going to turn it back over to Roger we're going to see if anybody has any
questions. Thank you so we have a a
mic and if you've got any questions hold the mic close to your mouth and let us
know your name and affiliation and what's the question and we'll have any of
us do our best to answer it.
Hi Craig Holman with Public Citizen. I'm trying to figure out how extensive the
political ad tv database is uh you know from CMAG they've got a they use
satellite technology so they pretty well capture all campaign ads that air on
television how is it you decide which ads to capture how extensive is
your campaign ad database does that make sense? Oh makes a great deal of sense
absolutely um so CMAG a section of cantar media is a commercial
organization who just not in advertising but from our data perspective produces
what is currently probably the most comprehensive um they do a great job
tracking ads and other kinds of elements of of television we're not a competitor
to them by any means we are hacking in an open way at treating media as
data looking at ads and other kinds of attributes allowing people to
experimentally see how they can explore those and visualize those and interpret
those in an open library so if we were to look at comprehensiveness and
widespread coverage CMAG is from my personal perspective is clearly the best
we're a new experiment an experiment that's trying to work with you just like
we're a public library we're a public library for you on this issue could I
refine my question yes please I mean like CMAG uses uh through their satellite
technology regular television stations will send a signal saying okay here comes
an ad and then it picks that up so it picks up just about all the ads that way
how do you identify which ads you uh will put in your database do you have people
like watching television in the markets I'd like to to bump this to Dan but
there's somebody from CMAG in the audience who also might address some of the
magic behind what they do which is not exactly as you assume it is a it's even
more complex and challenging than that would it were that that uh that it was as
easy as that in fact there's lots of folk hacking at how you reliably
algorithmically have computers and machines doing this work but allow me to bump
back to our senior engineer Dan Schultz sure so right now with what we're
launching today finding the first copy of an ad is a is a pretty manual process
and that was what I was getting at about over the next couple months where
basically the tool has the ability to find any repeated content whether we
flagged it or not and then surface that to a human when it's been repeated enough
times to be oh this is probably a political ad or this is probably an ad in
general and so this the concept of discovery in in a semi-automated way is
coming it's not there yet but the the the pathway there would be as
we're seeing pieces of content that show up again and again and again all that
would take is a human saying that is a political ad that is a Kraft macaroni and
cheese ad right but the once you've picked out a political ad whether it was you
watched tv and you saw it and flagged it or the dupletron discovered it and
exposed it once it's in the system as an ad it gets added to the political ad
archive does does that clarify and make sense and you go through the back line
say that oh and that yes that process we have 100 you know we have 100
000 videos in there now and so that repetition discovery process would go through
that backlog as well hi my name is Michael Beckle and I'm a reporter at
the Center for Public Integrity I wanted to sort of follow up on Craig's question
if the process is working well and the ads are identified it looks like you
know the 20 major markets that you all are focused on and just to make sure
I'm understanding that so if you know the ad airs in Iowa it's going to be
captured but if the same ad aired in Minnesota it might not be is that basically
that's true yeah if it's and and so then within within those states you know
these key battleground states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, Ohio do you have
a sense of you know have you captured you know 98 percent of ads that you think
are airing or 90 percent or you know the extent to which these markets that you
pick do relate to the viewers in those states receiving those messages if that
makes sense we don't know yet we've just flown open the doors and first time
this has ever been done in this kind of public fashion so we'll be looking at the
data to see and exposing it all to get a sense of how comprehensive we are what
we've missed we have noted that you know there's a couple versions of of ads one
where it may be the same voice actor with a lower timber or it's a different
voice actor our system is accurate enough to pick up that this is a this is a
this is different so that was a surprise to us and we're we expect and as you can
imagine we welcome those sorts of surprises
Hi Tom Broan with Newsday here are you going to go back and double check against
various filings with the FEC and the FCC to see if you've missed any ads or to
double check your coverage so we're relying on our partners who are the experts
in doing that to get that kind of information we're the as part of the project we
are not yet anyway integrating the reports to the federal communications
commission on ad contract buys the the you know actual dollar amounts being spent
where we're going to start worked first with just quantifying these counts and
but I know that there are various projects underway at some of our partners to
try to do that and as that comes online we hope to integrate things like that I
don't know if any of them want to address that perhaps Robert so we presently are
at a point where we have a full database of I believe it's about approaching 400
,000 records from the federal communications commission we have set up a procedure
to standardize the records we have scraped entire pdfs for I don't have an
exact count of it but it's in the very large tens of thousands so that those
documents are searchable um and the aim here is to be able to
update that data on a daily basis assign it a group assign it an id
whether it's an employee identification number for a 501c organization or a
committee id for a federal election commission reporting entity and that way
that the aim there is to be able to track with the ads that we're seeing in
the political ad tracker but also to see how that meshes with federal election
commission data and so we're at a point where this is is very close to being at
least something that we can update internally on a daily basis and and provide in
some manner on the site whether that's at least just going to you know if you see
an ad by patriot majority that doesn't have a federal election commission report
you can at least come to us and say here by date by station are the reports that
patriot majority or cautious gps or any of these groups have filed with the fcc
i'd like to this is a great question and one of the great opportunities that we
have is to provide some ground truth on just what the stations are reporting in
their so-called political files the public inspection files which they're now
required to upload to the fcc alas they can upload them as pdfs doesn't even have
to be text they can be pictures they can be um askew they can be fuzzy um but
this is the one of the first chances that a a bunch of people up here and
throughout the that are represented on the stage and throughout the country and
in universities and other places are working to crack those pdfs open make them
structured data join them with the open data that we're creating and
interestingly enough in this room two people to your right is gray gallon who is
the the fcc's first chief data officer who implemented um just that that database
so i'm sure he's available for more on uh on how it works and what its challenges
are and what its opportunities are for the future could i add a little to that as
well um one really um i think that is exciting to me because i am one of those
people who's wrestled with those data and know how interesting but also
frustrating they can be is that we are capturing these ads as they actually air
as roger says so not everything gets reported to the fcc not everything gets
reported to the fcc um you know there's a lot of rules about what does what
doesn't um i've been in the position where political you know a local broadcast
station will say well i don't have to post those files because this wasn't an
issue of quote unquote national importance so there's a lot of loopholes so it's
great to look at those things but what we're going to be doing is unearthing what
actually airs and helping folks identify those and then you guys can start
running with that and saying wait a minute they didn't even report this to the
fcc or the fcc or whatever government agencies theoretically should have records
or conversely we have to say we can also people can also say they did report and
they were crazy accurate and how wonderful is that to not only bring critique
against those who don't but bring approval and and and highlight those who are
responsibly doing a great job because there are people out there who do and we
think that they deserve attention if only to credit what they've done but also to
create a positive feedback loop so others go maybe we better too because not only
might we get uh a slight spanking and look bad but we look good and i want to we
want to join these stations that also look good i just wanted to add one more
note about the fcc we submitted our comments to the fcc encouraging them they'll
have a vote next week i believe it is um to possibly expand the the politic the
public file to satellite radio and cable so we'd be getting a lot bigger chunk of
the data if that goes through um and i'm gonna pass so i actually have a question
for you guys um and it's about uh the the two-way street opportunities for the
public so say you know i live in ohio i see an ad uh can you walk me
through the process whereby um i could go to your website see
if the ad's there and if it isn't there is there an opportunity for me to flag it
for you absolutely we want that and thanks for bringing that up um
yes you can reach us in a number of ways um depending on how comfortable you are
with things you can email us at the i had the well i'm nancy w at archive.org if
you spot something um if you see something in our tv broadcast news library i
think i'll ask dan how best someone can mark that so that we know it's there do
you sure i don't know if um i think probably for now the best that would be to to
tweet at us and let us know yeah okay where you were and and and what time you
were was like the general time you were watching maybe what channel if you do
that we'll find it um it's at pellet ad archive.org or i'm also
at at n watsman w a t z m a n uh yes calif yeah so just i just want
to make a quick comment like the questions about like comprehensiveness for me as
a you know as an outsider as a data scientist um you know the way i kind of look
at is as any library it's it's not going to get absolutely everything that's out
there but because what they're doing is open data um for someone like me it's
really exciting because like the question of well how could someone flag that you
know to me it's like well you know someone else would come along say hey let's
make a little shazam like app where you see a political ad you know you could run
it and and with the apis that they're providing and the way in which they're
exposing that data some a developer like me could come along build an app like
that and make that available to the public um or you know type of stuff i do
which involves you know deep learning image recognition the you know the
opportunities to be able to take these ads and process them and say well you know
what ads feature people smiling or frowning or you know doing uh you know
different types of analysis and music so to someone like me it's like yeah it may
not be as comprehensive it may not get everything that's out there by by a long
shot but you know again to someone like me i see this is just starting uh and so
the opportunities i think i think to me it's really about taking the the world of
media into that data world that people might like me live in and creating those
bridges so that we can you know process and do incredible stuff with it before
you before you hand the mic over kalov could you introduce yourself and what's
your filly i'm uh kalovli taru um and i do a lot of big data big data work
actually just two quick questions what's the turnaround when an ad first appears
and when it'll show up on your site and the second thing is is that did i hear
this right you're not including cable you're just doing uh public uh or or
commercial airwaves or whatever um so we are our our goal is to get ads up at
least 24 hours after they air um we as roger said we're just flipping the switch
today um we expect that we'll get better as time goes on we'd like to be quicker
than that we may not hit that 24-hour goal immediately on everything but that's
the goal and hopefully we'll do better and yes right now we are not tracking
cable um you know as as with everything we would love to do everything we're
starting where we can start and how far back do you have now um so we're we are
in each of the states we're tracking and there's a list of those eight states and
the materials um we're trying to get two months of television proceeding where
whether it's the caucus or an election so we've been recording in iowa new
hampshire for quite some time and we're moving on to other states such as
colorado nevada south carolina north carolina florida ohio uh
virginia i think that might be i think that's the list yes tracy or
uh i just wanted to point out that we are tracking about 20 to 30 uh cable
channels in san francisco so if it did have national coverage an ad we would
actually end up uh tracking and fingerprinting it but but you're but the answer's
generally right for the markets we're tracking um also this is sort of a a lead
but nancy could you explain a little bit about um how we're manually finding ads
now by maybe subscribing to feeds and things like that and looking at uh things
that are getting pushed from campaigns because yes i mean right now we're doing a
combination as dan said we we have both the human and uh the duplet ron process
right so the human processes again i mentioned there's an army back in san
francisco and in other places um so folks are actually scouring the uh public
channels on youtube and other spots where candidates post ads or super PACs post
ads etc so when we see them there we're loading them into our site so we can
create those fingerprints and once we create a fingerprint again we're golden
except when in those very interesting situations where we don't find matches
because the ad as aired is a little bit different in sound quality than the ad as
posted but those in themselves can become stories uh the one that really brought
that to our attention was actually the trump immigration ad um the voice uh that
we captured as we like to say in the wild from where it aired on tv uh the the
voice was i believe lower the narrator's voice was substantially lower at least
enough lower that that it did not match to the youtube copy we had but then we
were able to find a copy i mean because we had the copy in the wild we can create
that fingerprint now we're hoping what that will lead to is really great things
where we can distinguish between ads that are earned media and ads that are paid
media because when broadcast news errors those ads often they'll use the youtube
copy so um that way we're not quite there yet but hopefully we'll be able to
distinguish between that and tell folks oh you know this ad um as a paid ad aired
this many times and it was also repeated on this many news broadcasts just to
clarify um a little quotidian point but we're librarians and you're journalists
so we're all comfortable here um if the uh the broadcast in the wild ad was a
higher timber and the uh the youtube ad as posted the first uh was
a um a lower register
uh is there any more questions yeah michael bechol again
from the center for public integrity as a reporter you know wanting to stay on
top of what's new and uh you know whether you know i'm following a particular
campaign or trying to just focus on ads in a particular state what tools are
available through this new website you know the sunlight foundation for instance
has different alerts and things that i can subscribe to are there going to be
features like that or is there you know one landing page that you know i should
go back to over and over that kind of thing so the landing page political ad
archive.org our twitter feed are good to monitor for now um as one of the
features we hoped out in the future we do hope to build an alert service of some
sort you know whether it's something you subscribe to or some sort of feed that
that you get to see the latest ads aired but um for right now the best place to
do that is to go the website dan do you have anything to add all i'll say is
reach i mean when i mentioned if anybody wants to collaborate or wants to use
this stuff the data or the code reach out to me uh at slifty on twitter
um reach out to nancy on her handle or the or the archive the point is this is a
living breathing project so when you have something that would be useful to you
we need i we need to know about it because then we can
build something around it so
have have any of the candidates reacted to what you're doing or do they even know
what you're doing not yet probably as i said we've just thrown open the doors
today okay i do have one more quick question the downloadable database
does that include the frequency of the airings and the markets yeah that is one
line per airing so every if you download the csv every row in that in that
table corresponds to a single airing on a single channel so you can know the time
that that airing happened the channel that happened the location and the and the
market among other things about the ad in general if you go to the website there
is a tab that says data and it has the list of the data we provide and
definitions of what should be in the csv hi thank you very much for doing this
i'm don kaley i'm a columnist for a newspaper in ugine oregon my question is to
the fact checkers how long will it be before those that put up the ads no longer
volunteer the data that they're drawing from and just shrug at
you and say we're not going to tell you where we got that number you go figure it
out well i mean if the past is any explanation
or the the general response that we've seen before
is that the campaigns actually designate somebody to respond to our
background information requests now that could change but
in general they have adapted to us
normally the campaigns in the past have been pretty good at putting
together the the backup and you know it'll be kind of like a chart thing where
it's got the the quote from the ad on the left and then on the right are
citations of what backs that up although i would have to say not so much on ads
but on claims in general we we have some campaigns that are very very responsive
to us and some campaigns that are not responsive at all and then some that are
somewhere in the middle sometimes responding sometimes not and we're really just
now starting to get into the thick of the ads so it'll be interesting to see how
well they are doing those backup reports and and sending them to us yes i totally
agree and for example the rubio ad that i talked about one of the claims the one
about the guns they only pointed to the executive action announcement but nothing
else and it was up to us to give the fuller picture so we work with the backup
that they send and then do the rest of the reporting to complement that just uh
just to be clear there's nothing that they're they're not required to give you
any backup i mean there's no regulations or anything like that i mean at some
point they could just shrug and say go find it they already do you know there's a
campaign that once told me it's not up to the speaker to prove that we're right
and i said no it actually is i'd rather not right now
in in in that vein i thought the campaigns did have a self-interest because
the tv stations can be challenged about false advertising and if they're not
airing true ads or true enough ads that they can be pulled uh is that not a
regulation it is but it yeah it's very difficult for you know so many things are
misleading and that so it kind of becomes a little bit of a gray area and it you
know it's yeah i don't i mean things that are qualified it has to be really
really false i guess is what i'm saying to see a local station pull the ad and it
does i don't know what the data is on that maybe somebody else knows but it does
not happen very often can
i ask a question of the fact checkers one thing that
i found interesting looking at nonprofits that aren't actually non-profits is
that when you look at they're often saying you know our purpose is to educate the
public we are we're an educational organization and we've on
many occasions used the fact checkers reports to say you know this well-funded
organization that's running thousands of ads is running false ads repeatedly and
we're pointing to the research that y'all are doing i'm wondering what their
response to you because the response from an outside group and it doesn't have to
be just a five one c but a super pack or you know any other outside group they're
not technically the candidate even though they you know it's it's sort of uh it's
an extension of the campaigns but do they respond in a different way when you
call them then the campaign itself does it all depends on the group i mean
some of them are large they they want to have a presence and so
for whatever reason they will be responsive but others know you can sometimes try
to reach somebody and get absolutely nowhere that generally your experience guys
i mean some of the groups are even hard to get a hold of and i mean i'm sure
you've found that too you go to their website and it's like a p.o box and no
phone number but others are emailing us and we have a contact person and you know
they're pretty aggressive in terms of being in touch with media
thanks are there more questions
one super super quick i realized there was a question earlier about if somebody
sees an ad in the wild how can they find it in our site and i don't we we answer
the question of how they could report one but the way you would find it is
there's a search bar at the very top and you could just type in either the name
of the candidate or the name of the sponsor if you happen to catch it at the end
and you would you should and we should say the url for that it's archive.org
slash tv and you'd want to say you'd want to search for something that was
captioned you said actually i'm referring to the search on political ad arc oh
okay but but that too yeah right i wanted to offer just
a an interesting sort of little meta meta commentary you know marshall mcclellan
who said the medium is the message well one of the interesting things in the
areas that get inundated with political ads and it used to be they bought mostly
in news slots and now they're buying without we did an experiment in the
philadelphia television market in the um uh during the fall 2014 elections and
there was a bunch of as a governor of pennsylvania um representatives members of
the house of representatives from mariuson in in pennsylvania and new jersey they
were up and there's a lot of dark money flowing around and we were collaborating
with the university of delaware and they were asking an interesting question
which was so local news there's is making money hand over fist and airing in a
great deal of ads sometimes up to i think the maximum was like 13 uh 30 second
ads over a single 30 minute program uh 30 minute local news program well what
they discovered is something that's kind of disturbing and that is instead of the
medium becoming the message the message started becoming the medium itself and
they looked to see well did the local news programs and reflect uh editorially on
any of the content of the ads that they were airing back to back with all the
news that they were airing and sadly for our republics their their number was the
ratio between substantive political reporting on the ads or just about the
campaign that wasn't any campaign in the market area there wasn't a political
horse race substantive political ads of substantive political reporting against
the amount of time devoted to political advertising within those news programs 40
to 1 40 minutes of political advertising for every one minute of substantive
political reporting on the elections in the region it's because we offer this
service um this that um this scholarly group was able to
ask this question answer it soundly and because it's an open archive anybody can
go back and reflect and do their own sort of accounting
thanks are there any other questions we have a few more minutes before we break
yeah i mean if not i might ask a few um yeah i'm just interested again to hear
from the fact checkers uh have if you've done other elections if this is not your
you know first time doing it how whether you're seeing any big a differences in
uh in the ways that candidates are saying things or i'd also be interested in
kind of a another question do you notice a lot of differences between the ads
that are sponsored by the candidates themselves or the ones that are sponsored by
outside groups yeah well i'll take the second part um i mean you it's kind of a
generalization but um we do see um more negative or
harder hitting attacks um however you want to define that from the outside groups
than we do from the candidates themselves and i mean it's kind of like a um the
candidate it's easier i guess for those groups to make um more controversial
claims perhaps or um you know more a more negative claim because
they're just you know some name of some group whereas the candidate stand is
standing you know directly behind that ad and that claim so that would be you
know one kind of difference that we that we see there i think back to eight years
ago um i was in iowa right around this time a little earlier covering the caucus
for the dallas morning news where i worked and the notion of a super PAC or or a
non-profit coming into the iowa caucuses and spending millions upon millions of
dollars on tv ads or digital ads or even canvassing or some of the core functions
of a campaign would have been nonsensical in part because super PACs did not
exist and non-profits did not have the types of powers that that they do quite in
the way that that they have now so on a very very basic level it just shows that
in less than a decade the campaign environment the battleground if you will has
shifted uh so markedly not to be unrecognizable but but in a way that that's
quite profound and in a way where where you can't make really apples to apples
comparisons in a meaningful way to the election that barack obama was running
against hillary clinton at that time and the one that hillary clinton is now
running against bernie sanders or for that matter any of the republicans eight
years ago to the ones today and you know i think oftentimes where we're so uh
enmeshed in the moment and we're focused on everything that's happening now to
take a step back just for a moment and and look at what was just happening in
years ago and how different it is really shows uh how 2016 is a
unique political animal unto itself and and that we've we've moved in a for
better or for worse in a very different direction than we were going in uh eight
years ago yeah and on that note it might be a good point when i started on this
project one of the things i did was i went to archive.org and i found old
political ads you know from the 60s from the 70s and what struck me was that a
lot of those ads back then were really honestly they were the candidate talking
to the camera about what i'm going to do about energy policy it was amazing how
just kind of straightforward and non-slick they were and then of course along
came the daisy ad the famous daisy ad that is on the archive you can find it and
that was the ad that the johnson campaign did that famously showed a little girl
with a daisy and then there's a you know kind of a nuclear explosion. Well on the
republican side in particular the vast majority of ads uh it our our data shows
that the vast majority of ads at least on the republican presidential side uh are
being sponsored by so-called outside organizations the super PACs and non-profits
so you have a situation there in particular where it's not the candidates talking
to the voters it's not the candidates committee that's the sponsor of the ad you
have a proxy war that's taken place where you have all of these other different
types of groups who are supporting Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or
John Kasich or Chris Christie or any of the others and they're the ones who are
providing the message so that the candidate can can in a way have plausible
deniability or implausible deniability some might suggest that that oh you know
we're not the ones who are behind the attack ads we're not the ones who are being
negative it's that independent outside group that that's a step or two or ten
away from my campaign and and we see less of that on the democratic side although
there are definitely democratic super PACs Hillary Clinton has quite an outside
machine unto herself and even Bernie Sanders who says I hate super PACs and
outside money is horrible and I would reform the whole system and that's the
basis of his campaign still even does involuntarily have some outside groups to a
degree supporting his campaign so everyone is affected and everyone is involved
at least most everyone so we're about finished with time do we want to say one
thing quickly I just wanted to say one quick thing that you don't even have to go
back to 2008 to see how far things have come I mean in 2012 it was sort of
scandalous that candidates were setting up super PACs that were you know
extensions of their campaigns now they're doing that openly and most candidates
over at least you know half a dozen candidates at this point have a 501c4 that is
run by the same people that run their super PACs it was established to raise
money from people who didn't want to be named these are you know not only do you
have the unlimited extension of the of the campaign but you have the unlimited
undisclosed extension of the campaign which did not exist in 2012 this is the
first presidential cycle we've ever seen that so the changes are coming
incredibly quickly so Roger would you like to say a few concluding words
yes from a librarians and archivists perspective so
we're trying to create this resource that's available to help citizens help make
sound choices when confronted by an enormous amount of money and an inundation of
of messaging and making these choices this year that affect themselves their
families their communities the world around us and will affect posterity
for decades to come from a archivist and librarian perspective more looking down
that timeline one of the great things about capturing as much as we can now on
the web on tv and so many other different media types is that the the greatest
insight will come via the hindsight five ten twenty fifty years from now so
we are trying to invest in the future of of the capability of insight for
generations to come in an era when so much is digital and so much is being lost
at every moment we're trying to strive to to meet the needs of people
now and help people reflect back on what we did and it's not all bad what did we
do good where was their great success and where did we go so wrong
thank you thanks for coming out