All the TV News Since 2009, Now Available At the Internet Archive

6 writes with news that the Internet Archive has launched an online archive of TV news content. According to the NY Times, it will "include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news." In addition to preserving the works of humankind, the archive is for helping citizens "better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs."

Comments

This Will Help Political Trolls Everywhere

[ilikenwf]

CNN and Fox News, etc will be all over this one - lots of nice, juicy (sometimes out of context) quotes and clips to use in their attacks toward the opponents of their biases...

Re:This Will Help Political Trolls Everywhere

[ichthus]

With searchable transcripts, all one will have to do is search out the video in it's entirety to get full context and debunk any deceit through selective editing. More information is usually a good thing.

Re:This Will Help Political Trolls Everywhere

[ichthus]

Dammit. "Its entirety", not "It's".

Re:This Will Help Political Trolls Everywhere

[Bigby]

I hope they make everyone look so bad that the public just gives up on the "lesser of two evils" method of voting.

Re:This Will Help Political Trolls Everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, stop with the selective editing already!

Re:This Will Help Political Trolls Everywhere

[Beorytis]

A nice thought, but the debunking never seems to attract the attention that the bunk does.

Re:This Will Help Political Trolls Everywhere

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Obama: "Mine will be the most transparent administration in history."

I'm pretty sure that is a misquote since googling it only turns up anti-obama sites. That's poor form if you want to show something actually hypocritical and not just more fauxbama stuff.

Best I can make out, it refers to his promise to increase access to government records by putting lots of stuff into an internet database. I remember when it went online as the Open Government Initiative. You will see the word "Transparency" is the first ont he sub-heading of that page.

If you want to get a more grounded list of broken promises, try the Obameter. But, I want to point out that broken campaign promises aren't quite the same thing as "flip-flopping" which, in the GP's context of daily show clips, refers to taking up contradictory positions in public statements -- campaign promises are goals that may not be achieved due to circumstances beyond the candidate's control, flip-flops are 100% willful decisions to simply say different things.

Re:This Will Help Political Trolls Everywhere

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Still a misquote - you might call it a summarization, but leaving out the part about "establish a system" completely changes the meaning because what you actually found on the whitehouse website narrowly refers to the OGI.

All the news since 2009!?

[TaoPhoenix]

How did they manage the copyright clearance for THAT!?

Re:All the news since 2009!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually US Broadcast news has special copyright exemptions http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/uscode/17/1/108

Re:All the news since 2009!?

[RocketAcademy]

Yes, and it' $50 to borrow a clip for 30 days. The service is based on the Vanderbilt Television Archive, which has been providing a similar service since 1968. (They didn't start on the Internet, obviously.) This is a service that will be of use primarily to the news media and PR professionals. It isn't "all the TV news," either, by a long shot. I just tried searching for a small company that's made national news several times and got zero hits.

Re:All the news since 2009!?

[TubeSteak]

The act of copying all this news material is protected under a federal copyright agreement signed in 1976. That was in reaction to a challenge to a news assembly project started by Vanderbilt University in 1968.

ALL = American?

[diodeus]

I guess "All the news" need not contain any foreign sources. Disappointing.

Re:ALL = American?

[flimflammer]

Considering the apparent purpose for this, having foreign news seems like it would be a pointless addition.

Re:ALL = American?

[funwithBSD]

All the news by 20 agencies, not every agency everywhere.

That is the goal, but I could see how some agencies in other countries might not be willing or able to provide the material.

The BBC America seems to be part of the import.

Re:Good for research

[jeffmeden]

This could help very interesting research regarding how often certain topics are discussed, or certain buzzwords are used. It's pretty exciting I think.

Given how many news programs are aired live and CC subs are done in realtime, i bet the research is going to be more limited than you think unless you want to start by analyzing frequently misspelled words.

Re:Good for research

[vlm]

This could help very interesting research regarding how often certain topics are discussed, or certain buzzwords are used. It's pretty exciting I think.

I want to run a Fourier analysis on the human interest stories. I've always been told the tired old "LSD is regaining popularity" has a wavelength around 36 months, roughly every 3 years, blah blah blah.

Also fun to track stories about fads. Remember when every Prius on the road was spontaneously accelerating on the highway?

Another truly weird analysis project would be analyzing coughs and colds, like a graph of each time a newscaster sneezed. I bet that analysis could be fully automated and over a long term with nation wide collection of local news (which, admittedly, this is not) would provide a pretty interesting graph of the spread of illnesses.

Missing some channels

[Beetle B.]

No Al-Jazeera English?

No BBC?

Really?