Tune the dial back to 1947 and hear it skip a few centuries

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Tune the dial back to 1947 and hear it skip a few centuries

CBS and Archive.org time machines

Here are a couple of online resources that might be useful in media law, history or public affairs journalism classes...

Archive.org has a collection of CBS "You Are There" radio episodes as MP3 files, including a "live newscast" of the John Peter Zenger libel trial... in 1735.

A few years later, the television series "Studio One" brought "The Trial of John Peter Zenger" to the living room screen in 1953, and archive.org provides this copy: (2009 Update: Unfortunately, these links to the video at archive.org, including the player, have been disabled, possibly because archive.org discovered the video was not fully released from copyright. The You Are There MP3 audio is still available, as are the IMDB information links.)

See Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB.co) for more details. I couldn't help noticing the casting of Marian Seldes as the 18th century's Mrs. Zenger, who took over while her printer husband was in prison. The actress's uncle George Seldes was a crusading journalist of the 20th century.

In both the You Are There audio and the Studio One video, you hear Zenger -- and freedom of speech -- creatively defended by Andrew Hamilton (not Alexander): Play MP3 audio of the You Are There program

"You Are There" (which also made it to television in the 1950s) dramatized historic events and presented them as newscasts by familiar CBS News voices of the day. It tried to capture a "live" feel, as the announcers "switched" from the studio to reporters in the field, sometimes having trouble getting a connection to, say, the battlefield in Lexington. I haven't analyzed any of the programs, but I have listened closely enough to say it sounds like the folks involved were having fun.

The 80-something episodes, broadcast between 1947 and 1950, reach back more than a millennium to the last day of Pompeii, and cover events as diverse as an 1853 Women's Rights Convention and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: You_Are There_OTR

The free archive may have glitches. Example: If you play episode 4, the Salem witchcraft trials, you get a different episode, the defeat of the Spanish Armada. However, episode 12 apparently was a rebroadcast of episode 4, so you can tune in all the way to Salem, 1692, and make up your own mind about the extent to which the broadcasters were thinking of a more contemporary witch hunt.

Back to the present: Archive video

For somewhat more timely news, archive.org also has video recordings of the most recent Democratic and Republican presidential debates. See its "Election 2008 Political Speech" page.

And... The archive's News and Public Affairs video collection includes the interview series "Open Mind," with episodes that might come in handy in a Media & Society class, including topics like media violence, celebrity coverage, cameras in courtrooms... and the power of the media in general.