broadcast-coverage-comparison

Compare indexed television coverage across stations and shows with Crawlora GDELT TV search, charts, timelines, and discovery. Use for a bounded broadcast topic brief with speech/caption/OCR/visual channels, station windows, processing lag, and metric denominators kept distinct.

Access and scope

Set CRAWLORA_API_KEY to your Crawlora key. Prefer the listed Crawlora MCP tools when connected; otherwise use the bundled scripts/crawlora.sh, which sends x-api-key to https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1. Read reference/endpoints.md for exact methods and parameters. Check application code as well as HTTP status; payloads are inside data. Stop on authentication errors, back off on 429, and retry a transient upstream failure once. Bound calls/pages by the requested scope and credit budget. Retain source IDs, URLs, source dates, and observation/crawl times separately.

Compare how a topic is represented in GDELT's indexed television material. Establish stations/shows, topic terms, match channel, date window, and comparison metric before querying. This describes indexed coverage, not public opinion or verified audience exposure.

Discover coverage and define equivalent queries

• Use station details to discover allowed station codes and their available windows. Confirm actual channel/time coverage rather than assuming every declared station has the same archive or processing freshness. Public TV index results can lag broadcasts; recent absence may be processing delay.
• Keep human captions, machine speech-to-text, OCR onscreen text, extracted concepts, and computer-vision labels separate. Discover concept MID/visual values from their catalogs. A visual/concept label is a machine/index signal, not verified presence, identity, sentiment, or an endorsement.
• Build matching query ledgers for compared stations. Repeated positive terms within one channel are OR'd; exclusions require absence. A station/exclusion- only query is invalid: supply a positive content field. Short speech/OCR terms have the documented five-word cap. Do not add a hypothetical free-text query field.
• Use either relative timespan or an absolute from/to window, not both. Station chart accepts repeated station parameters; per-station timelines need the relevant station. Store exact query, raw timestamps, source URL, and cutoff.

sh

scripts/crawlora.sh /gdelt/tv-stationdetails
scripts/crawlora.sh /gdelt/tv-stationchart station=CNN station=MSNBC caption="climate change" timespan=7d
scripts/crawlora.sh /gdelt/tv-timeline station=CNN caption="climate change" timespan=7d

Compare metrics and inspect supporting material

Station-chart count is a raw match count; show-chart count is a percentage of matching results; timeline values describe matched airtime/volume according to their returned metric. Preserve units and denominators rather than treating all three as counts or comparable shares. Timeline resolution is auto-selected from the window; there is no TV smooth parameter. Compare actual timestamp bins and label unavailable periods instead of filling them with zero.

Inspect a bounded clip/search sample with timestamps and source links to qualify framing, false matches, or repeated segments. Several matches within a broadcast are not unique viewers, distinct stories, or independent reporting. Quote briefly and attribute captured speech/text; OCR/ASR output is not a verified transcript. Do not compute total-airtime shares or cross-station audience shares without compatible denominators supplied by an independent source.

Return a query/coverage ledger, metric-specific comparison tables/timelines, sampled material, processing and coverage gaps, and supported framing observations. More indexed coverage does not establish belief, endorsement, bias, popularity, or a causal effect on an audience. Do not schedule tracking or contact stations from a one-off comparison request.