A reprise of MIPoPS Moving History screening from last August:

For this archival screening night, MIPoPS presents “Breaking News!” featuring archival news stories and programming from regional archives. We’ll explore our local news history, starting with On Cue, a program aired on the first anniversary of KIRO-TV’s inaugural broadcast on February 12, 1959. This “day in the life” of local television news is part of the KIRO-TV Special Programs videotape collection held by the UW Libraries, Special Collections. Following that, we’ll share historical broadcast pieces from our participating institutions, including MOHAI, the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Municipal Archives, the Wing Luke Museum and many more.

In an age when we are bombarded with multiple news stories and sources on a daily basis, it is important to reflect on our media history. Before Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, the Seattle area relied on KING, KIRO, KOMO, KCTS, and the Seattle Channel for their local television news. How we documented and described ourselves through broadcast reporting was (and continues to be) an essential part of how we formed our identity as a city and a community.

Television news has been called the first draft of history, but archival collections of local news broadcasts are scarce. Worldwide, more than 30 million hours of unique television programming are broadcast every year, yet only a tiny fraction of it is preserved for future reference, and only a fraction of that material is publicly accessible. Most television broadcasts are simply lost forever, though television archivists have been working diligently to preserve this important resource.

Television remains the most powerful medium in our culture, but we have almost no memory of it: broadcasts are ephemeral, and therefore difficult to analyze, fact–check, and evaluate. Publicly accessible television archives could transform television into a medium with a permanent history that is searchable, accessible, and therefore accountable.