Visual Explorer's Visual Channel Comparer: Comparing CNN, MSNBC & Fox News' 2022 Midterms Coverage

 November 14, 2022

Last week we unveiled a new Visual Explorer tool called the Visual Channel Comparer that allows you to create thumbnail strips comparing the coverage of multiple channels over a given time period. To showcase the power of this new tool, we've applied it to compare the coverage on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News on November 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th last week by hour. For each hour you can download a thumbnail grid with three columns (the first column is CNN, second is MSNBC and third is Fox News) and where each row represents one minute of airtime. In essence, every 60 seconds during that hour we screen captured what was playing on each of the three channels and display that side-by-side. All times are in the UTC timezone.

Look closely and you'll see just how strongly the tone and emotion of the three channels shifts over the course of those four days.

You can download all of the images below. Credit them as "Data from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive processed by the GDELT Project."

For the technically-minded, the code we used was:

#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

#create the list of hours to compare...
rm SEQ
time seq 0 23 | parallel -j 1 -q perl -e 'printf("20221107%02d0000\t20221107%02d0000\t11/7/2022 %d:00 - %d:00 UTC\n",{1},{1}+1,{1},{1}+1)' >> SEQ
time seq 0 23 | parallel -j 1 -q perl -e 'printf("20221108%02d0000\t20221108%02d0000\t11/8/2022 %d:00 - %d:00 UTC\n",{1},{1}+1,{1},{1}+1)' >> SEQ
time seq 0 23 | parallel -j 1 -q perl -e 'printf("20221109%02d0000\t20221109%02d0000\t11/9/2022 %d:00 - %d:00 UTC\n",{1},{1}+1,{1},{1}+1)' >> SEQ
time seq 0 23 | parallel -j 1 -q perl -e 'printf("20221110%02d0000\t20221110%02d0000\t11/10/2022 %d:00 - %d:00 UTC\n",{1},{1}+1,{1},{1}+1)' >> SEQ

#generate the comparison images...
time cat SEQ | parallel --colsep '\t' --eta -j 1 "./vechancompare.pl {1} {2} CNN,MSNBC,FOXNEWS 300x175 60 && mv MONTAGE.jpg montage-cnnmsnbcfox-{1}-{2}-60s.jpg"

#create an HTML list of all of the images...
rm HTML.html; time cat SEQ | parallel --colsep '\t' --eta -j 1 -q perl -e 'print "<li><a href=\"https://storage.googleapis.com/data.gdeltproject.org/blog/2022-tv-news-visual-explorer/montage-cnnmsnbcfox-{1}-{2}-60s.jpg\" TARGET=_BLANK>CNN vs MSNBC vs FOX News {3}</a>\n"' >> HTML.html

You can see each of the comparison strips below: