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The Vanderbilt Television News Archive was founded by Paul Simpson a Nashville businessman. The mission of the archive is to equip students and scholars with the tools necessary to both engage with and critique news coverage by making actual copies widely available.

According to the official history of the archive written by Simpson, he watched a news program where Timothy Leary recommended that young Americans find themselves by freeing their mind and experimenting with LSD. The recommendation shocked and appalled Simpson. After watching the program, Simpson wanted to watch the program again to confirm what he had heard. It was through his attempts to locate a recording of the news program that he discovered that nowhere were news programs being preserved for future generations. At the time, networks only preserved news program for two weeks— after which tapes were erased and then reused.

Simpson was also motivated by a 1967 book in which former President of CBS News, Fred Friendly, was quoted as having said “for the most part we were…just a bunch of old radio hands learning the hard way that cameras need something more than emulsion and light valves to create electronic journalism. The missing ingredients were conviction, controversy and a point of view”. His experience watching Leary, together with Friendly’s comments, prompted Simpson to think more seriously about the influence of the news on the television audience; particularly within the context of what he perceived to be one-sided news coverage of Vietnam that was fueling protest against the war both in the United States and abroad.

These events culminated in Simpson’s decision to begin coordinating efforts to preserve news programs. Initially, he sought out funding to begin a non-profit ; however, he ultimately decided that a college library would be more ideal because of their experience in preserving newspapers and magazines. Simpson selected Vanderbilt because he graduated from the university’s law school and lived in Nashville. He approached Frank P. Grisham, the new director of the Joint University Libraries, with the idea. This led to conversations with Vanderbilt’s Chancellor G. Alexander Heard (1917-2009). On July 29, 1968, Chancellor Heard appointed an ad hoc committee to develop a feasibility proposal . Recordings began on August 5, 1968 to coincide with the 1968 Republican National Convention. The first taping was recorded on rented equipment with tape supplied by Simpson and friends of the University.

In 1980, a relationship was established with the Library of Congress to provide copies of tapes for permanent preservation by the Library of Congress. As stated in Chapter Six of a Report of the Librarian of Congress: Television and Video Preservation 1997: “As part of the [1976] Copyright Act, the American Television and Radio Archives (ATRA) legislation authorized the Library of Congress to record off-air regularly scheduled newscasts and on-the-spot coverage of news events. The Television News Archive of Vanderbilt University has worked cooperatively with the Library to help fulfill ATRA’s mandate.” (http://www.getcited.org/pub/100245740 ) This relationship continues to the present.

In January of 1994, the Archive was given a special award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Nashville/MidSouth Chapter on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. In 2013, the Archive was awarded the Governors’ Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Nashville/MidSouth Chapter, the regional academy’s highest honor, and received an Emmy® Statuette (http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2013/01/regional-emmy-awards/).