Up at Night

The Project September 24, 2010

The project that I am pondering involves creating an online, open source database of Sunday morning political affairs shows.  The reason:  These Sunday shows have been permanent figure of not only American television for decades, but they also play a major role in setting the political discourse for our country.   The first of these shows, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” debuted in 1947.

Since this time, these show like all television, has been important in creating a shared past.  These shows are heavily watched across the country, often setting the agenda for that week’s political debates.  Even in the era of multiple channels of obtaining information, these shows still enjoy high ratings.  “Meet the Press” still averages over 3 million viewers per week while both “Face the Nation” and “This Week” each average over 2.6 million viewers per week.

They are filled with guests, who utilize the platform in order to push a particular message. The shows tend to be targeted toward Beltway elites, usually faithfully watched by White House staffers and Congressional aids.    As a result, what is talked about and how discussions are framed end up influencing Washington behavior.

Therefore, these talk shows would be of extreme value to a U.S. political or cultural historian.  However, there does not seem to be a digital archive for these shows.  The closest database is the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive.  But this database is contains mostly transcripts of the daily nightly news shows from NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, Univision, and CNN.  These date all the way back to 1968.  Only clips from CNN and NBC are digitized and can be watched with the RealPlayer plugin.  If you want to view clips from the other stations, you must check out the analog tapes.  This costs money.

My proposal is to have a database of archived digital videos from these shows.  The database would be an ongoing project, probably ran by a university’s history center (or in collaboration with the university’s political science and communication departments), since it would require weekly uploading of shows along with transcribing the show so that there can be an advance search option.  The database would include video clips for these shows:

• NBC’s “Meet the Press” (debuted in 1947)
• ABC’s “This Week” (debuted in 1981)
• CBS’s “Face the Nation” (debuted in 1954)
• Fox’s “Fox News Sunday” (debuted in 1996)
• CNN’s “State of the Union” (debuted in 2009)
• Noticiero Univision’s “Al Punto” (debuted in 2007)

I am still surveying the environment for anything similar and/or looking for good ideas.  Although, thus far it does not look like there is anything for these shows (I am even having a hard time finding a database of transcripts).  Any thoughts, suggestions, constructive criticisms are always welcome.