![]() (It seems half of my job is finding interesting reasons to combine code others have written-a testament to the strong state of open source software.)ĭid you know OS X has a built-in command for capturing screenshots? I didn’t.į = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix=‘.png’, prefix=’imagemagick_’) None of these were too difficult separately, so combining them into a single script was totally doable. Run an optical character recognition ( OCR) program on the image, and save the resulting text somewhere. ![]() Crop that image so that just the lower third of on-screen text remains.Take a screenshot of the news coverage.But by splitting up the problem into smaller, easier steps, I was able to get a basic scraper working. Screenshot of the final piece Breaking Down the Technical Problemsįinding a way to “scrape” the text off of cable news was an intimidating task. The concept of comparing three channels at once felt compelling. Even if it just confirmed what we’ve experienced anecdotally when flipping between channels, we would have hard data to back up or challenge our impressions. If we could juxtapose what different networks were saying about the same event in real time, it would expose-in an immediate and concrete way-what networks felt was the most important news out of the hearing. ![]() But the more my next-desk-neighbor Samuel Granados and I thought about it, the stronger we felt the idea was. I dropped the idea of tracking cable news lower thirds into our #graphics-pitches Slack room, and we all agreed the concept was interesting but it might be difficult to tell a story. The graphics team at The Washington Post tracked what each network displayed in its lower third caption panel-also called a chyron-and showed it to readers as the hearing unfolded. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all aired former FBI director James Comey’s testimony live and uninterrupted. But last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing provided a rare opportunity to explore a new angle. Reporting on media bias and the bubbles it creates is nothing new.
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