The Lear Center Local News Archive is a unique resource for academics, journalists and the public. This site offers access to a video archive of campaign news stories aired on local television stations during the 2004 campaign.

The Lear Center has collected information on campaign news stories on local television stations across the country since 1998. In 2002, The Lear Center received funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts to build the Local News Archive, a fully searchable database, containing transcripts and video of 10,814 campaign news stories. Registered users could search the entire database by keywords or phrases, or by dozens of more specific criteria, producing all relevant video clips as a result. Funding is currently being sought so that the 2002 archive can continue to be available to registered users online.

In 2004, the Lear Center received funding from the Joyce Foundation to launch a new video archive with data from the 2004 election. The Archive contains information from four network affiliates in each of 11 markets: Dallas, Dayton, Denver, Des Moines, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Seattle and Tampa. In each market, we capture all programming from 5:00 pm to 11:30 pm on every network affiliate in the market. We analyze all news programming and note when public affairs programming such as locally produced political talk shows, debates and town hall meetings appear.

In partnership with the Pew Hispanic Center , the Lear Center Local News Archive is also collecting data on Spanish-language news broadcasts. The archive tracks Telemundo’s and Univision’s nightly national news broadcasts and compares them with those of ABC, CBS and NBC, and cable news programs, including CNN (Wolf Blitzer), MSN (Dan Abrams) and FOX (Shepard Smith). Six local Spanish-language affiliates – two each in Los Angeles, Miami and New York – are also included in the sample. The Lear Center and the Pew Hispanic Center will document how political coverage on Spanish-language stations – both national and local – compare to English language news broadcasts.

For more detailed information about the contents of the Archive, read our FAQ. For more information on the history of this project, read our Background page.