A common issue we all face has an easy solution! If you ever see a news clip without context and you don’t know where it came from, this is a fast and simple way to find it.
Contents
Introduction
Instructional Video
The Step-By-Step Written Guide
How to Find A Clip the “Hard Way”
In Closing
Introduction
For a long time I’ve been promising and have wanted to build an index of research tips and tools to help teach you how to be effective and quick with your own digs. This is the beginning of just that!
Here’s the scenario: You’ve come across a news clip that you find incredibly interesting. You might see it on social media without a source, embedded on another site with no contextual information provided, or maybe you even caught a segment of a show and recorded the TV with your own phone, but now you want to know where and when it actually came from. This happens to me all the time, and I’d be willing to bet you’ve experienced it too.
It’s easy to just screenshot or screen record the things we see and share it without double checking. However, realistically there are too many people out there who will deceptively edit a video or present it wildly out of context. If you’re not convinced you’re getting the full story, or you just like being thorough, this is for you.
The primary method described in the video and article is incredibly fast and easy. Sometimes, that method doesn’t work. If for some reason the easy way doesn’t cut it, I’ve also added a couple of alternative methods to help you reach the same end goal without too much hassle.
Instructional Video
This will walk you through what you need to do step-by-step, and highlights a few other features of the Internet Archive, which is the primary tool used for this instructional. If you prefer written instructions, want to go more in-depth, or want hyperlinks to take you to the pages and examples mentioned, immediately under the video is the full how-to guide.
The Step-By-Step Written Guide
Step One: Find A Clip You Need to Source
In reality, you probably won’t actually be searching out random unsourced news clips to track down. However, you probably come across one in your daily web browsing—potentially quite often. I encounter this problem constantly when casually browsing social media, forums, and even some “news sites” that tend to forego the extra work it takes to find out a clip’s origins.
Individuals casually share excerpts from news programs, or TikTok videos they stumbled across of a recording of a news program. Honestly, it’s not a huge deal… until it is. Sometimes the videos may seem too good to be true, or play to confirmation biases. Sometimes videos like that are circulated as bait to discredit a broad group of people as being “dumb” or “misinformed.” It’s unfortunate tactics like that work quite well.
For the record, if this is something you do or have done before, I am not judging you. I am absolutely guilty of doing the same thing, and I am trying to be better about it. This is a challenge to myself and to you to take an extra second to verify things we see and share.
Example Video: Leana Wen in March/April
To demonstrate what I’m referring to, use the tweet below as an example.
It’s a clip of Leana Wen that went viral in late March/early April of 2021 before many people knew who she was, and before her passion for medical tyranny was a well-known subject.
None of this is meant as a slight of the person who shared the video originally. at all.
Using it as an objective example, however, we can make note of a few things:
- The clip comes from Cuomo Prime Time.
- Covid vaccines are mentioned, therefore this clip aired sometime after the vaccines were made available early in 2021. It also would fall sometime after the December/January spike in illness, as re-opening is referenced.
- Since the tweet we are referencing was posted on April 1, 2021 in the evening, we know that it aired sometime between February 1, 2021, and April 1, 2021. That’s still a pretty large window, but it helps.
- The original poster does mention Leana’s name, which can certainly make searching for the clip easier. If for some reason her name weren’t available, we could still find the clip in the end.
When we are narrowing down our “hard mode” searches later, inferred context like this will be key.
Note: While the clip above is incredibly easy to find now by searching what’s said on pretty much any search engine, at the time it was not. I wrote an article about Leana which I published on May 7, 2021. Even at the time of writing it, this clip was not easy to source. That’s why I’m using it as an example.
Step Two: Head On Over to the Internet Archive
The primary tool we are going to use to find this clip is known as the Internet Archive, or the “Wayback Machine.” It’s a fantastic resource that allows you to explore old versions of websites, save a website as you find it to view later, and so much more.
It is absolutely worth mentioning that groups like Reclaim the Net, which advocates strongly for free speech online, has reported that the Wayback Machine caved to pressure from MIT and other external voices, and was caught deleting, editing, or refusing to archive certain sites and content from certain people. As far as saving webpages goes, I don’t recommend it. I’ll do another article on web archivers soon.
However, there is an entire other side to the Wayback Machine not involved in webpage archiving that is indisputably one of the greatest troves of information on the internet.
One of the lesser-used aspects of the Internet Archive is an incredibly powerful and immensely handy section of PDFS, videos, audio, images, software, and more. Many libraries are constantly digitizing old books, and even the Smithsonian Libraries use the Internet Archive to digitize old texts.
With respect to our example and search, we’ll be searching the index of TV News Captions, which encompasses most major networks and is updated rapidly after each segment airs. Usually within a day or two, especially with larger networks. As of right now there are over 2.1 full episodes uploaded, that are fully searchable!
So to truly begin in our search, you’ll want to head to the Internet Archive. There are two different search bars on the main page.
In the second search bar, which searches the digital archives, you’ll want to type in a few words that were said in the clip you’re trying to find.
In this example, we’re searching for “my main concern is that we’re not going to reach herd immunity.”
Be sure to select “Search TV news captions” and hit Enter or click “Go.”
Step Three: If All Goes Well, You Should Find It
On the search results page, take note of what clips populate for your search. In this particular example, it’s the first and only result, which is great.
If you don’t see your clip, or if there are too many search results, there are a few things you can do to troubleshoot without taking too much time:
- Make sure your search matches what is being said in the segment you are trying to find, and edit for accuracy if need be. Typically, you won’t have to be exact, but getting as close as possible helps.
- By typing in “my concern is we won’t reach herd immunity,” which sounds pretty close but is inaccurate, you won’t find anything. So if you come up empty at first, double check you heard it correctly and try again.
- Skip words you’re unsure about if you need to.
- It’s better to be accurate with your search and skip a few words than to fill in what you can’t hear definitively. If we search for “my main concern reach herd immunity,” when leaves out “is that we’re not going to” entirely and still pulls up the Cuomo Prime Time episode with no fuss.
- If you have too many results with your initial search, pick out a sentence or part of a sentence that has unique names or phrases in it if possible.
- If you search for “reach herd immunity” for example, over 2,300 results will greet you, as that phrase is mentioned quite a few times, verbatim, on the news.
Step Four: Trim Your Clip
Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, click the thumbnail, and a transcript of the episode will appear along with the video that corresponds with it.
Step Five: Share or Embed Video
From here you need to press play on the video, then select the “Share, embed, or refine this clip” option in the bottom right corner to trim down your video.
After that, you can drag the sliders as needed.
Underneath there are share options which include embedding, sending by email email, or posting the clip to a few selected social media sites. You can also share the URL of the page you’re on by copy and pasting.
Step Six: That’s It! Mission Accomplished
Wasn’t that simple? I hope it helped. Happy hunting!
How to Find A Clip the “Hard Way”
If your initial searches are still coming up empty, never fear! Archive.org has over 2.1 million clips, spanning from 2011 to 2021, and that number grows every day. As long as the segment you’re looking for is from the last ten years, you should still be able to find it.
For this example’s sake we’ll pretend we don’t know Leana Wen’s name. We just have an estimate of dates and Chris Cuomo to go off of.
Start by heading to the Television Archive section of the Internet Archive.
From here, you can narrow down your search by news station or channel. In this example, we know the clip comes from CNN, so we’re going to select the first option presented.. which is CNN.
In the sidebar, you can narrow down by year and topic, if that helps. We know that the clip comes from 2021, so we’ll narrow it down to that first.
We also know the clip comes from on or before April 1, 2021 (the day we “found” it first) and after January 21, 2021 (she refers to a Biden presidency), so we can sort the clips to appear in an ascending or descending order to get us closer.
Narrow It Down
However, in this example that isn’t very useful since we have over 6,000 results. That won’t get us very far, and it’s way too many options to go through manually.
To narrow it down quickly, click “Title” in the upper menu bar.
This will pull up an A-Z list. Select “C” (for Cuomo Prime Time). This brings us down to 3,006 results.
There are plenty of other shows that start with “C” so in the search bar we can type in “Cuomo Prime Time” to narrow the search again.
That alone gets us down to 333 results. If you consider we are searching for clips from January 21, 2021 to April 1, 2021, the number is actually much less.
Try A Shortcut
From here, there’s a few things you can try. The first thing is seeing if there is a video that has a high number of views, if the topic covered is popular or controversial. Click to sort by views at the top.
This isn’t a fail safe, as Archive.org doesn’t actually have a high volume of traffic in this area of the site. However, it’s worth a try! In this instance, the first result does turn out to be what we’re looking for.
But what if it isn’t? We can keep narrowing it down from here!
In the sidebar, under “Topics & Subjects” we see “Chris” is an option. We KNOW the clip comes from Cuomo Prime Time (whose host is Chris Cuomo), so that’s a sure bet. Check the box that says “Chris” to filter out more. That brings us down to 223 possibilities.
We still have 223 potential results (less, if you consider the dates) and that’s a LOT. Where to go from here?
You can try the search bar again (all your other conditions will stay) and you can search for another small phrase. I’m going to use “narrow window.”
Almost There
Boom! Down to just 19 results. That was fast. But in actuality, since we have our episodes organized by dates, and we are looking in a date range from January 21, 2021 (she refers to Biden as president in the clip) – April 1, 2021 (the date we found the clip), there are really only four options.
When you’re down to just a few, it’s pretty easy to find. Start with the first possibility by clicking it, and a new window will open breaking the episode down into segments.
This is very handy, as each segment is 1 minute long. You can scroll through quickly to see if your clip will appear.
Note: The scroll on this page is horizontal at the bottom of the screen.
And, lo and behold, we scroll over just a bit and see Leana and Chris, with Leana in the same outfit as the original clip. Even though this was a bit tedious, we still found it in the end!
Head back to the original instructions to learn how to select a specific moment in the segment that you can then share share or embed somewhere else.
In Closing
This issue comes up a surprisingly often amount, at least for me. Random screen recordings, a quick video you see on social media, or a clip you might have recorded yourself from a TV can be found in a quick series of trial and error.
In the best case scenario, a quick search for a few key words should do, and you’ll find it quickly. But if not, you can still get there pretty quickly!
If you are searching for another clip that comes from a time before 2011 (when Archive.org began archiving daily episodes from major news networks, I will make another instructional soon to help you find it just as quickly and easily.
Being able to research quickly and effectively doesn’t have to be terribly complicated if you know how! And I plan on teaching you everything I know so you can be as effective as possible. Stay tuned as this Instructional index begins to take form.
Talk soon,
L
PS: If you haven’t checked out my dig I did previously on Leana Wen, you can find it below.
PPS: Find me on social media!
Start Exploring
Agenda 21 Agenda 2030 Andrew Cuomo Barack Obama Bernie Sanders Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Bill Clinton Bill Gates Black Lives Matter Capitol Protests Censorship Clinton Foundation CNN Covid-19 Covid Vaccine Cuomo Prime Time Donald Trump Dr. Fauci Election 2020 FDA George Soros Ghislaine Maxwell Hillary Clinton Hunter Biden Jack Dorsey January 6th Jeffrey Epstein Jen Psaki Joe Biden Margaret Chan Microsoft Millennium Development Goals Nancy Pelosi National Institute of Health Peter Daszak Population Control Sustainable Development Goals Tedros Ghebreyesus The Lancet TIkTok Twitch Twitter United Nations Vaccine Passports World Health Organization
Kym Condon says
L, Thank you SO MUCH for this. We need to learn how to research all this info the proper way using the proper tools. The other day, today is Sept. 21st you were talking about different search engines you use, I would love a video on those but one, in particular, I am looking for that I can’t remember. I think it was (i ..something..dot.ai) and would show up as an email window with links on the right and sources on the left. I would love to know which search engine that is. I would love to see videos on how to cut up videos to make our own, how to make good gifs and memes.
Thank you so much!
Eric L says
Originally I had come on here to check out what you were like. I see your posts or re-posts often on Gab so I wanted to find out if the person behind the scene was a maniac or a decent person? I read the two guides you put out and those have convinced me that you are a good person who does care about others. You did a great job on the instructionals, good info. I can say you seem to have a good idea here and thank you this has helped me. You have put a lot of work and effort into your instructions. On gab I’m EErock. In case you are curious? Have a great evening and thank you again for what you are doing and the help in searching for info! CyA
Lar says
WOW, that is so powerful and so easy. Thank you so much for everything you do. Looking forward to the live stream tomorrow! I would love to gain an insight in how best to protect myself against online intrusive activities. Also the search engines mentioned in the post at the top.
Thanks again