‘PBS NewsHour’ Archive To Be Digitized

More than three decades of PBS NewsHour broadcasts from 1975 to 2007 will be preserved and available online as part of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB).

Public media producer WGBH Boston, the Library of Congress and WETA Washington will digitize, preserve and allow the public online access to PBS NewsHour’s predecessor programs from 1975 to 2007, made possible with funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources.

The project will digitize nearly 10,000 programs comprising more than 8,000 recorded hours that chronicle American and foreign affairs, providing access to original source material, including interviews with presidents and other world leaders and reports on major issues and events. The content will be presented as a part of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress.

Noting the value of preserving the PBS NewsHour material, Steven Roberts, journalist and the Shapiro Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, said: “No other broadcast on television has upheld the highest standards of the profession with such consistent devotion.”

The digitized PBS NewsHour collection will provide valuable primary-source material not available elsewhere for historians to consider in their explorations into the recent past, especially in the areas of politics, policymaking and international affairs. It will give scholars a previously unavailable source from which to study ideas and rhetoric to illuminate what intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers recently characterized as “a multi-sided contest of arguments and social visions that ranged across the late 20th century.”

The programs feature interviews with leading newsmakers including presidents, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, every secretary of state since 1976 and with world leaders including the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, Fidel Castro, Muammar Khadafy, Yasser Arafat, Menachem Begin, Boris Yeltsin, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher.

The collection includes extensive coverage of election campaigns, African-American history, global and domestic health care, poverty, technology, immigration debates, the end of the Cold War, terrorism, the economy, climate change, energy issues, religion, education issues, rural life, scientific exploration, poetry and the media.

The PBS NewsHour collection will be made available on the AAPB website, growing the online collection to more than 20,000 programs.