Using Google's Speech Recognition And Natural Language APIs To Thematically Analyze Television

Television news coverage is typically thought of as a visual medium, yet most of the narrative we consume from television comes in the form of spoken narration. Watching a news show with the audio muted and closed captioning off reinforces that the visual elements of television act more as enrichment than primary information conveyor. This means that quantifying this spoken narrative is imperative to understanding what television news is paying attention to and how it is framing and covering those events. Using Google's Cloud Speech-to-Text API to transcribe a week of television news coverage and annotating it with Google's Natural Language API, what might we learn about how television news covers the world? In the United States, most television stations provide closed captioning for their news programming, meaning they already come with a textual human-produced transcript.