The Internet Archives, recently launched their newest section on recorded television broadcasts from news organizations such as NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC, including Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Report.”
The Internet Archives Organization is a “501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.”
As part of a class exercise, I went onto evaluate the ethics of TV news section where they have over 356, 000 videos to view. On the surface, this is most likely violating copyright law. However, the purposes of the TV archives reaches far beyond any means of reproducing a product.
What the TV archives aims to do is make audiences critical about the television they are watching. Instead of hearing about how FOX Cable News Network has decided to make every program about the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth in the United States, viewers can actually view it for themselves.
New York University Professor and Journalist, Farai Chideya sees the project as something to be applauded,
At some level the Television Archives will really will allow people to not only rely on gatekeepers, people like me who are trained journalists, but to also be gatekeepers and to free themselves in terms of information.
What I searched for was Invisible Children. Back in March of this year, this film “Kony 2012” sky rocketed into internet fame for a small thirty minute video discussing the horrors occurring in Central Africa under the Lord’s Resistance Army. I had previously know about the conflict and had been working with Invisible Children for more than a year when the film was discussed on every television screen.
Now, I can look back and see what people were discussing. For someone how is doing a documentary, these video clips are valuable to knowing what was actually being reported on at the time of the videos release.
Despite the legality question of this content, I strongly support the project. Like C-SPAN, the viewer is able to judge for themselves what they see in comparison with all other sources. Otherwise, researching on one topic would take forever. This a very effective and useful tool in learning about the way media operates in the U.S. and finding trends for evaluating months, and even years after an original event has occurred.