Do you need help getting started? Follow each of these tutorials in order to master the use of the TV News database.
Follow the steps listed in the menu on the left to learn how to create a loan request, starting with Account Creation.
We have several forms of access that may help you with your research project. Our website includes abstracts of virtually every story in our collection. You can search and refine a list of news stories, survey coverage and observe the frequency of reporting. But as you probably know, the actual footage is not available to stream online due to copyright restrictions. To view the clips or stories, you have a couple options:
The VTNA does not hold copyright to any of the content in the collection and cannot give permission for any form of use. Much like a book you borrow from a library, licensing and permission questions must go to the publisher and owner of the content -- in this case the broadcast networks. Please visit Stanford University's Measuring Fair Use.
Our Collection Details page has a listing of every news program included in the collection. You can also browse our broadcast index for a chronological listing of the collection.
Loan requests can take up to five business days to fulfill. If this is your first time receiving your order via the Media Account, you will receive two emails. The first email will ask you to navigate to media.vanderbilt.edu, click Login and then click forgot my password. From there you will enter your email address and create a password. This allows you to access your Media Account. The second email contains a link to a folder that contains the contents of your order. You must be logged into your Media Account in order to open the link. In some instances these emails are sent to spam or junk email folders. If you do not receive these email, please check your spam or junk email folders.
The TV News Archive began nightly recordings of an hour of Fox News Channel beginning in 2004. They were able to add this capacity with special funding, but the funding was not enough to include segmented abstracts. Our archive management system can only present nightly news reports if they are segmented. So, from 2005 to May, 2021, the TV News Archive website does not have any public listings of news reports for Fox News, except for what you discovered: special reports. During this time, researchers were only able to view the Fox News evening news collection by visiting our Archive in Nashville, TN.
But more recently, the Archive deployed a new workflow that utilizes voice-to-text transcripts of the evening news. Using this workflow, we now segment Special Report with Bret Baer every night, beginning on June 1st, 2021. We are also looking into additional automation to segment the backlog (2005 to May 2021) with machine learning. This development project is ongoing with no timeline for release.
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive cannot remove the date, network and timestamp featured in the upper third of every frame. This graphic was burned into every frame at the point of capture. Better quality versions of archival video can sometimes be accessed by the originating news network.
