You can find the Github repository for this project here.
This week I wrote a Python script that was designed to take the transcript from Donald Trump’s first press conference as president, isolate any lines that contain the word “fake”, and print those lines.
SOURCE TEXT
I am using a New York Times transcript of Donald Trumps first press conference as my source material. It’s a gold mine of one liners and Trumpisms (“Trumps” as I call them), but I am specifically interested in his obsession with “fake news”, particularly as a distraction from himself and his team. For this project, I loop over the source text and pull only lines containing the word “fake”, allowing me to isolate these statements from the full 412 line text.
CONSIDERATIONS
I wanted to clean up the text that came form the script as much as possible, to focus on what was said, some from Trump and some form the reporters at the press conference. I stripped out instances of “TRUMP:” and “QUESTION:” from the transcript and tried to remove other unwanted words such as (inaudible) and (ph). For some reason that I haven’t yet figured out, stripping them didn’t work. I’ll have to keep playing with that.
RESULTS
I randomly sorted the outputs from the script, so there are a lot of iterations of the resulting text. Here was my favorite:
Very fake news.
I just want to get you to clarify this very important point. Can you say definitively that nobody on your campaign had any contacts with the Russians during the campaign? And on the leaks, is it fake news or are these real leaks?
And, you know, you can talk all you want about Russia, which was all a, you know, fake news, fabricated deal, to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats and the press plays right into it. In fact, I saw a couple of the people that were supposedly involved with all of this — that they know nothing about it; they weren’t in Russia; they never made a phone call to Russia; they never received a phone call.
Just because of the attack of fake news and attacking our network, I just want to ask you, sir…
Well the leaks are real. You’re the one that wrote about them and reported them, I mean the leaks are real. You know what they said, you saw it and the leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake. So one thing that I felt it was very important to do — and I hope we can correct it. Because there’s nobody I have more respect for — well, maybe a little bit but the reporters, good reporters.
t’s all fake news. It’s all fake news. The nice thing is, I see it starting to turn, where people are now looking at the illegal — I think it’s very important — the illegal, giving out classified information. It was — and let me just tell you, it was given out like so much.
We won the presidency. We got some senators, we got some – all over the country, you take a look, he’s done a great job. And I said to myself, you know – and I said to somebody that was in the room, I said “you take a look at Reince, he’s working so hard just putting out fires that are fake fires.” I mean, they’re fake. They’re not true. And isn’t that a shame because he’d rather be working on healthcare, he’d rather be working on tax reform, Jim (ph).
ssia is fake news. Russia — this is fake news put out by the media. The real news is the fact that people, probably from the Obama administration because they’re there, because we have our new people going in place, right now.
(inaudible) …for those who believe that there is something to it, is there anything that you have learned over the last few weeks that you might be able to reveal that might ease their concerns that this isn’t fake news? And second…
I’m changing it from fake news, though.
ybe it is. But I want to just tell you, the false reporting by the media, by you people, the false, horrible, fake reporting makes it much harder to make a deal with Russia. And probably Putin said “you know.” He’s sitting behind his desk and he’s saying “you know, I see what’s going on in the United States, I follow it closely. It’s going to be impossible for President Trump to ever get along with Russia because of all the pressure he’s got with this fake story.” OK?