Veracity Radio

I’ve been recording television news for over a decade. The greatest bulk of recordings are from CSPAN. With hundreds of hours of hearings, press conferences, speeches, and special presentations, CSPAN has kept my VCRs, DVDRs, and computers busy for so long I can’t fathom the time. What started as a need to gather actualities from public officials morphed into watching for the sparse moments of accountability.

Well CSPAN has really outdone itself with its latest offering. According to them, their entire video library is online. I’ve scanned it and let me tell you, it is quite impressive. Clearly this isn’t every video feed ever covered, but they have done a really good job at referencing important materials that are key to any research of public government and private voices about governance.
Try for yourself: CSPAN Library

Or if you type in a keyword like Rumsfeld, you can get over 400 videos so far:
Rumsfeld

As a blogger, a researcher, and a media hound, I have to be able to find relevant source material fairly quickly or I can either lose focus on the story, be interrupted with pressing current events, or lose leads on information. It is a relief that I am able to say to myself, “Ok, George Bush spoke about Abu Zubaydah on September 6, 2006, being a high value detainee”, and then deciding I need to go back and visit the words and account before compared to what is publicly known later.

There are times when the video record can completely change my understanding of older issues. I might notice a congress member for the first time, be reminded of one who is now gone (Tom Delay, Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy), or one who was grilled before our eyes, Alberto Gonzales.

I love that I can now search to precise moments in time where officials testified, spoke publicly, or were the subjects of other panel inquiry. We’ll be filling in several older articles with CSPAN video and creating a weekly archives visit to key moments in our history.

We’ll still be digitizing the tapes we have just in case CSPAN ever takes the library down, but we are deeply thankful and impressed with their efforts.
To Start us of this post, lets visit the speech George Bush gave to the CIA on September 26, 2001:

There are some videos that do not have embed tags, but you can watch them at CSPAN’s site and link to them from articles or your favorite social media pages. But when the videos can be embedded into a blogger’s page it helps the reader complete the picture with contemporary coverage by the only channel focused on watching U.S. government process and related politics.