The archive is a powerful tool that allows you to search thousands of political stories that ran on local, national and cable news broadcasts during the 2004 election season. You can search by several criteria and make your search as broad or as narrow as you need. The Archive is a tremendously useful resource for academics, journalists and broadcast professionals, and for anyone interested in coverage of elections on local news, national broadcasts and cable news channels.
The Lear Center Local Archive contains two archives: The English Archive contains video clips from local television broadcasts on stations in 11 markets, as well as video clips from national broadcasts on ABC, CBS, CNN, FOXNEWS, NBC, and MSNBC. The Spanish Archive contains video clips from local television broadcasts in three markets and national broadcasts from Telemundo and Univision.
English Language Archive
English Language and Spanish Language news broadcasts have been split into two separate archives. In the English Language Archive, users will find the following:
- campaign stories aired from 5:00 pm to 11:30 pm in 11 media markets
between October 4, 2004, and November 1, 2004. See
our FAQ for a complete list.
- nightly national news broadcasts aired on ABC, CBS, and NBC between
October 4 and November 1, 2004
- nightly news shows on CNN (Wolf Blitzer), MSN (Dan Abrams) and FOX
(Shepard Smith) between October 4 and November 1, 2004
Spanish Language Archive
In the Spanish Language Archive, users will find the following:
- all evening news broadcasts aired between 5:00 p.m. and 11:30 p.m.
on September 30, October 1 and October 4 – November 1, 2004, on
the following Spanish-language local stations: KMEX (Univision) and
KVEA (Telemundo) in Los Angeles; WLTV (Univision) and WSCV (Telemundo)
in Miami; and WXTV (Univision) and WNJU (Telemundo) in New York.
- nightly national news broadcasts aired on Telemundo and Univision
on September 30, October 1 and October 4 – November 1, 2004
Registered users can search this unique archive of campaign news stories
by several criteria, including
| Headlines | Story tone | |
| Type of race (governor, senate, etc.) | Candidate | |
| Station ownership | Political party | |
| Network | Media market | |
| Story focus (strategy, issues, adwatch, etc.) | Station call letters |
The Archive can provide valuable information for academics, journalists,
and anyone interested in election coverage.
The Lear Center Local News Archive is a tremendous research tool for scholars – it provides the first comprehensive archive of local news coverage of elections. Researchers can run a broad search on general criteria – such as the date stories aired – or a narrow search using multiple criteria.
For Journalists and Broadcast Professionals:
Journalists and broadcast professionals can use the archive to identify story ideas or find innovative ways to produce quality campaign news stories. The archive permits searches on the basis of several indicators, including whether the story concentrates on issues or strategy, and whether a candidate featured in a story is portrayed in a positive or negative light. The archive also permits searches on whether news stories addressed Latino/Hispanic interests, and whether those interests were the focus of the story.
The archive gives users easy access to our video collection of campaign news stories. Users can define search criteria and submit queries to explore a wide variety of interesting topics. Are you interested in the way Republican candidates are portrayed in Los Angeles? Or how many Ad-Watch stories aired in Miami? The archive allows you to define the search to meet your particular interests.
Registration is free and quick, and will allow you to search the archive.
