Someone at CNN actually counted all the words in each address. That’s not something an ordinary person can do, by the way. And it’s worth whatever big bucks they’re getting, definitely.
Software can most likely do that.
Or someone just got a copy of the speech via video with "CLOSED CAPTION," and copy the "CLOSED CAPTION" text, put it into the program of choice {MicroSoft WORD, WordPerfect etc} and have the program do the counting (Paragraphs, word count, sentence count, etc.) probably took a total of 15 - 20 min's max.