What would it look like to compare Belarusian, Russian & Ukrainian television coverage side-by-side? Using the Visual Explorer's Visual Channel Comparer, it is trivial to create a customized side-by-side comparison that displays a selection of channels in 60 second intervals, with each column being a channel and the rows being what was displayed onscreen at the beginning of that minute.
Comparing BELARUSTV, 1TV, NTV, RUSSIA1, RUSSIA24 and ESPRESO for a single hour yesterday is as simple as:
#install the libraries we need... apt-get -y install imagemagick apt-get -y install parallel #download the comparer script... wget https://storage.googleapis.com/data.gdeltproject.org/blog/2022-tv-news-visual-explorer/vechancompare.pl chmod 755 vechancompare.pl mkdir /dev/shm/tmp export MAGICK_TEMPORARY_PATH=/dev/shm/tmp/ time ./vechancompare.pl 20221215120000 20221215130000 BELARUSTV,1TV,NTV,RUSSIA1,RUSSIA24,ESPRESO 250x150 60
You can see the final results below, showing their very different visual styles and focal points in that hour. Russia 24 can be seen to emphasize Putin heavily, while 1TV, NTV and Russia 1 instead focus on panel discussions.
