Vanderbilt Television News Archive

Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Type	Television Archive
Established	August 5, 1968
Collection
Items collected	News broadcasts of United States national television networks
Other information
Director	John Lynch; Executive Director: Marshall Breeding
Website	http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive, founded in August 1968, maintains a library of televised network news programs. Located in Nashville, Tennessee, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is a unit of the Vanderbilt University Libraries.

Collection

The Archive’s collection consists of more than 40,000 hours of video content, including:

• The daily news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC from 1948 to the present
• A daily one hour CNN news program beginning in 1995
• A daily one hour Fox News program beginning in 1996
• The weeknight broadcasts of Nightline by ABC, beginning in 1981
• The networks’ televised coverage of live presidential speeches, press conferences, summit meetings, and other events
• The networks’ televised coverage of live presidential election-related events, including debates, political conventions and election night coverage

Televised coverage of major news events preserved in the Archive's collection includes:

• The Vietnam War, 1968–1975
• President Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to China
• The Watergate hearings preceding the resignation of President Richard Nixon
• The 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis
• The 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan
• The 1986 Iran-Contra Hearings
• The 1989 San Francisco earthquake
• The 1991 Persian Gulf War
• The 1991 Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Hearings
• The 1999 impeachment of President Bill Clinton
• The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001
• The United States' military operations in Afghanistan from 2001 to the present
• The 2003 Iraq War
• The Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters of 1986 and 2003

Internet database and public access

The Archive maintains an on-line database, http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu, of abstracts and catalog records for most of the programs in its collection, which can be browsed or searched by subject, date and network.

Individuals may request loans of broadcasts or selected items from the Archive’s collection for reference, study, classroom instruction, and research. Borrowers pay fees for the items loaned to cover the costs of providing this service. The requested items are loaned as DVDs or VHS tapes, which must be returned to the Archive by the end of the loan period.

Due to copyright considerations, access to streaming video is available only to a limited audience, and only for certain portions of the collection (currently CNN and NBC). Only individuals associated with subscribing colleges and universities can view streaming video content. Visitors to the Archive can view all content from the Archive's collection.

History

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive was founded by Paul Simpson, a Nashville businessman, who in 1968 recognized a need to preserve the daily news broadcasts of the three major television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC. Simpson approached Vanderbilt University with his idea, and worked with members of the Vanderbilt administration to establish a pilot project at Vanderbilt's library. Recording began on August 5, 1968 to coincide with that year's Republican National Convention.

As the project grew, Simpson succeeded in finding private funding to sustain the Archive beyond its initial three-month trial period. Jim Pilkington was hired as the Archive’s first administrator, and a Ford Foundation grant made possible the abstracting and indexing of each news broadcast for inclusion in the Archive’s former monthly publication, “Television News Index and Abstracts.”

Collection characteristics

All Archive recordings have a network/time/date line added near the top of the picture to facilitate retrieval of specific news items.

Broadcasts prior to 1963 were recorded in black & white on Ampex 1-inch type A video tape recorders. Beginning in 1963, news programs were recorded in color on 3/4 inch U-matic cassettes. Currently the broadcasts are recorded as mpeg2, and nearly all the programs recorded in other formats have been digitally converted to that format.

Not every newscast since 1948 is available in the Archive, however, due mostly to circumstances beyond the Archive's control. Until the 1980s or so, the recordings were made off-air from Nashville's network television affiliates. Because of this, some weekend newscasts from 1968 until that time were not broadcast on the local stations due to station programming practices. For example, NBC affiliate WSM-TV, now WSMV, did not show the Saturday evening NBC newscast until December 1978 because of the station's tradition of carrying syndicated country music shows in the 5:30 p.m. Central Time slot on that day of the week. NBC did not in fact begin a Saturday newscast until January 1969, and the Sunday bulletin started in August 1970; WSM did clear the Sunday broadcast, though. Also, CBS affiliate WLAC (WTVF after 1975), from September 1971 until December 1978, did not carry the Saturday CBS Evening News, in order to broadcast local news and Hee Haw, a syndicated country music program that was produced at the WLAC/WTVF studios, between 5:30 and 7 p.m.

On the network level, between September 1971 and January 1976, CBS did not air a Sunday newscast because that hour was reserved for 60 Minutes, between 5 and 6 p.m. Central. Except for a one-year experiment on Saturdays between July 1975 and June 1976, ABC (local affiliate WNGE, now WKRN) did not begin airing newscasts on Sunday evenings until January 1979 and Saturday evenings until January 1985. Other than those occurrences, most of the weekend pre-emptions were (and still are) due to coverage of sporting events such as college and professional football and golf, protected contractually from being interrupted before their endings (see "Heidi Game" for explanation).

In a number of cases, because of the convergence of pre-emptions on all three (historic) local network affiliates, some dates on weekends, again mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, have no newscasts at all available in the Archive. Prior to the 1980s, affiliate pre-emption of weekend network newscasts was quite common in many other medium-to-small-sized U.S. media markets, not just Nashville.

On several occasions, malfunctions of either the television set or the Ampex recorder caused a tape to have serious video or audio problems. In some cases, no recording could be made, explaining some of the weeknight date gaps in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the oldest tapes in the collection, mainly between 1968 and 1973, suffered varying degrees of loss of picture quality due to natural deterioration before they were digitized in the 2000s.

With a few exceptions, the Archive does not include recordings of documentaries and magazine shows such as 60 Minutes and Dateline NBC, because they typically are not concerned with immediate issues and events. They are thus considered by the Archive not to fall under the category of newscasts.

External links

• Vanderbilt Television News Archive web page