Analysis of Faces in a Decade of US Cable TV News

Abstract

Cable (TV) news reaches millions of US households each day. News stakeholders such as communications researchers, journalists, and media monitoring organizations are interested in the visual content of cable news, especially who is on-screen. Manual analysis, however, is labor intensive and limits the size of prior studies. We conduct a large-scale, quantitative analysis of the faces in a decade of cable news video from the top three US cable news networks (CNN, FOX, and MSNBC), totaling 244,038 hours between January 2010 and July 2019. Our work uses technologies such as automatic face and gender recognition to measure the "screen time" of faces and to enable visual analysis and exploration at scale. Our analysis method gives insight into a broad set of socially relevant topics. For instance, male-presenting faces receive much more screen time than female-presenting faces (2.4x in 2010, 1.9x in 2019). To make our dataset and annotations accessible, we release a public interface at https://tvnews.stanford.edu that allows the general public to write queries and to perform their own analyses.