Just the facts, just the facts, with factba.se

·29 min·2 clips

FactBase archives everything from George W. Bush's 2007 dinner jokes to the coffee shop on Biden's July 7th schedule.

The episode begins with host Jason Dick introducing FactBase as a resource for accessing White House transcripts, calendars, and releases, with examples like George W. Bush's 2007 Correspondents' Dinner and Biden's schedule details. Guest Bill Frischling, founder of FactBase, explains its founding in December 2016 after the election, sparked by a conversation about combating fake news with unfiltered presidential words. He resigned from his job at U.S. News & World Report to build the database, starting with a focus on Donald Trump's unique speech patterns. FactBase has since expanded to include historical data back to the Hoover administration and uses tools like Flesch-Kincaid to analyze presidential vocabulary, finding Trump's at a fourth-grade level, the most basic in nearly a century. The discussion covers the challenges of tracking modern presidential communications, such as Trump's use of Instagram for official announcements and his preference for platforms like Rumble and Truth Social, contrasting with Biden's more traditional press releases. FactBase now collaborates with Roll Call, employing fellows to write stories and analyze data, including stress analysis of the 2024 debate using voice models. Frischling notes that Biden's stress spiked only when attacking Trump, while Trump's unusual silence during Biden's struggles was out of character based on his historical patterns. The episode teases upcoming stories and convention coverage, emphasizing FactBase's goal to provide canonical, obsessive data collection without editorializing. It concludes with reminders about Roll Call's convention coverage and FactBase's availability on their website.

As heard by us

A careful tour of FactBase's political paper trail, from presidential remarks to platform-by-platform tracking.

Political Theater treats political record-keeping as a practical way to follow public politics. Jason Dix starts with the odd pleasures of FactBase searches, moving from George W.

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Why you'd press play

You want the White House paper trail, from George W. Bush's 2007 Correspondents' Dinner remarks to Biden's Denim Coffee stop.

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