Commentary
A Call to Action
For Political Communication Archives
J.H. Snider, APSA Congressional Fellow in Communications and Public Policy
The Telecommunications Act of 1996, as currently implemented by the FCC, requires that all TV news programming, including local TV news, be 100 percent closed captioned by January 1, 2006. The requirement is limited to "video program distributors" (e.g., a local cable operator or broadcast station) with more than $3 million in annual revenues.
According to a 1996 study by the National Association of Broadcasters, 57.1 percent of local TV stations already provide closed captioned local news programming. These stations provided 22.3 hours of local news per week, of which 19.5 hours (87.4 percent of the total news hours) were closed captioned. To make these closed captions available to scholars, the Political Communication Section should do the following:
Encourage revisions in the copyright law to allow libraries and the Library of Congress to capture closed captions and make them available to political communication scholars and others.
Express its views concerning copyright to the Library of Congress, the intellectual property subcommittees in Congress, the FCC, and potential allies, including the disabilities and foundation communities.
More generally, the Political Communication Section should encourage changes in the copyright law to facilitate accurate and complete library news archives, whether the archival format is text, audio, and/or video. Wherever possible, the quality of archives for print, Internet, TV, and radio news media — at both the local and national levels — should be brought to an equally high par. The law specifically pertaining to news archives in the 1976 Copyright Law is now obsolete.
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