As people get a deeper understanding about the way that the message of television works they will become more educated consumers of the news and that will make them better citizens and be able to hold people accountable either in government or any of the subjects that are covered in the news.

News organizations have to make gut decisions about how they approach coverage of something, whether or not they cover something, and a lot of that is based on memory and that memory can be faulty and s so exciting to have the opportunity that we can actually do a key word search and How many times did we talk about this issue in the last year? ... Obviously it's a huge opportunity to have access more -- anytime there's more information it's better for the democratic process.

Ordinary people can use this tool. People are increasingly involved as publishers themselves. They Tweet, they post to Facebook, they write blogs. If they can use this tool to access the content that they want to comment on, that they want to criticize, and incorporate it into the various social platforms that they're already using, it's going to enrich the sort of commentary that they're able to produce.

On YouTube it doesn't say where it came from, doesn't say the station, might be someone that just wrote—maybe even misspelled his name. So it's very hard to figure out—where did this come from? Did someone make this? Is this from a station? You can sometimes look for the logo but it's very hard to know, is this from 2008 or 2012? On YouTube very hard to know. Internet Archive tells you exactly: station, day, time, this is when it was said. ... giving people access to, "Where did this come from?" and, "What's the original space?" is really important.

One context that the TV Archive could be used in an educational environment is to train students in more media literacy… showing the ways that mass media, particularly news media, maybe also commercials, portrays particular topics, and also to ask students to create those videos themselves and perhaps in the act of creating they'll be able to make choices that make them aware of the choices that the people that create the media make.