Last year, the Internet Archive, a California-based organization that collects audio, moving images, and Web pages for historical purposes, built a site collecting more than 3000 hours of television coverage by American networks and others from cities around the world.
Titled Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive, the site is designed as a resource for scholars, journalists, and the public. It presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research, and analysis, say its organizers. They write on the 9/11 site: “Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media.”