This post was written by Shane Jafar, a Master of Marketing Candidate at Vanderbilt University. It was originally published on March 26, 2026 on the McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies website. The McGee Center aims to equip individuals with the essential skills and knowledge required to adeptly navigate and critically assess narratives in the dynamic media landscape of the 21st century. Through innovative research endeavors, collaborative educational initiatives, and active engagement with the community, the McGee Center is helping build a future where media literacy becomes a cornerstone for informed and empowered citizenship.
Have you ever wanted to know how major networks covered the events of the Vietnam War or how inflation was discussed in the 1970s? There is an archive for that!
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive (TVNA), the most extensive collection of U.S. television history, has recorded and preserved regularly scheduled evening newscasts since 1968. Today, the archive holds more than 1.5 million records and houses a Special Reports Collection that captures major world events, presidential speeches, and political debates.
A Resource Across Disciplines
TVNA has quietly powered scholarship across a surprisingly wide range of fields for decades. Since 2000, the archive has been cited more than 400 times in Google Scholar, with researchers in political science, journalism, economics, public health, criminology, and beyond finding value in its holdings.
The range of questions scholars have brought to the archive is striking. Economists at BYU used TVNA to show how news sentiment around fracking and labor markets influenced migration decisions — particularly among young, less-educated men. Criminologists from Florida State, Northeastern, and Bates College drew on the archive to examine the relationship between mass shooting events and media-driven moral panic. Public health researchers at Virginia Commonwealth used it to analyze two decades of opioid crisis coverage, revealing gaps in how the news framed the most vulnerable populations. And communications scholars at the University of South Florida and the University of Utah mined TVNA to trace shifts in presidential communication from Reagan through Trump.
Journalists and media historians have found it equally useful, from a book-length analysis of live network coverage of 9/11 to a study of how TV news anchors framed their on-air farewells. The archive has even appeared in scholarship on Confederate memorial debates, presidential Twitter use, and the challenges of digital preservation.
Now Fully Digitized and Text-Searchable
A major technical upgrade in recent years has made the archive significantly more accessible for large-scale research. The collection has been digitized and transcribed using automated speech recognition, meaning the full text of broadcasts is now searchable in ways that simply weren’t possible before. Advanced search options at the broadcast segment level include contributor, location and media topics based on IPTC’s taxonomy.
For researchers interested in computational methods, text mining, natural language processing, or large-scale data analysis, this opens up substantial new possibilities. Rather than manually reviewing footage clip by clip, scholars can now query across the entire archive programmatically, identifying patterns and trends across thousands of broadcasts spanning more than five decades.
How the McGee Center Can Help
Vanderbilt’s McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies is available to support researchers, educators, journalists, and other interested parties in making use of this data. Whether you need help scoping a research question, developing a query, or obtaining a ready-to-use dataset, the McGee Center offers tiered research services to match a range of needs from running a client-supplied query to developing complex, multi-format data packages with visualization dashboards.
Initial consultations are free and include up to an hour with TVNA experts to discuss your project, assess feasibility, and determine the right level of support.
If you’re a researcher, journalist, or educator with questions that decades of American television news might help answer, TVNA and the McGee Center are worth a closer look.
An annotated bibliography of research using the TVNA is available here.