The Newsroom
The news as it was broadcast — not as it was written down afterwards.
Bulletins, flashes, roundups and specials recorded off air between 1938 and 1949, filed in the order they went out. Every recording is public domain and streams from the Internet Archive; dates and durations come from the archive's own metadata.
2,007
Bulletins on the wire
12
Years filed
3,297
Other news recordings
The Wire
Year by year
Each year is a single running file. Open one and you hear the twelve months as a listener would have: the crisis, the correction, the flash that interrupts the dance band.
1938
Munich, the Anschluss and the crisis broadcasts that invented the news bulletin.
44 recordings
1939
The declaration of war, heard live from London.
94 recordings
1940
The Blitz, Dunkirk and Murrow on a London rooftop.
189 recordings
1941
Pearl Harbor: the flashes, the roundups and the day after.
202 recordings
1942
The war spreads; the networks build their correspondents' pool.
131 recordings
1943
North Africa, Sicily, the Italian surrender.
216 recordings
1944
D-Day hour by hour, then Paris and the Ardennes.
484 recordings
1945
Roosevelt's death, Belsen, V-E Day, the bomb and V-J Day.
435 recordings
1946
Nuremberg, the atomic tests, the first postwar elections.
50 recordings
1947
Partition, the Marshall Plan, the cold peace.
58 recordings
1948
The Berlin airlift and the Truman upset.
69 recordings
1949
NATO, the Soviet bomb and the end of the decade.
35 recordings
The Dateline
Pick a month and read the desk
Every dated news recording in the library, filed by the day it went out. Play a single bulletin, or start anywhere and let the month run on.
Pulling the file…
Around the newsroom
Correspondents, propaganda and the record
Network pool
The World Series on the Radio
October as it went out live — Series games from 1934 onward, called by the men who were there, innings and commercials intact.
916 recordings · 1934–1975
Networks
WWII News and Related Sound Files
Raw war coverage as it went out: bulletins, communiqués and correspondents' spots, filed year by year from 1939 to the surrender.
914 recordings · 1932–1946
Syndicated
American History Through the Eyes of Radio
American history acted out at the microphone, from colonial argument to the wars, in the plain declamatory style schools used to pipe into classrooms.
404 recordings · 1943–1974
CBS / NBC
D-Day: The Complete Broadcast Day
6 June 1944, hour by hour, exactly as CBS and NBC carried it — bulletins, prayers, communiqués and the long silences between.
302 recordings · 1944–1944
Networks
Wartime News Reports
Newsroom transfers from the late thirties and the war — the bulletin as it sounded before anyone knew how the story ended.
283 recordings · 1937–1945
NBC
The Pacific Story
NBC's wartime and postwar Pacific affairs series — history, geography and policy, broadcast late at night to whoever was still awake.
183 recordings · 1945–1947
BBC
Winston Churchill: The BBC Broadcasts
The wartime broadcasts as Britain heard them, from the BBC microphone in London.
100 recordings · 1934–1946
BBC
London Calling: BBC News at War
Bulletins from Broadcasting House as the war began — gas-mask drills, Chamberlain, the invasion of Norway.
75 recordings · 1939–1940
Syndicated (United Press)
Soldiers of the Press
Soldiers of the Press is a war drama that was created in New York and syndicated by World Broadcasting System.
40 recordings · 1942–1945
NBC
We Came This Way
University of The Air presented several educational programs between 1942 and 1948.
30 recordings · 1944–1945
Reichsrundfunk / Radio Tokyo
Broadcasting from the Enemy
Germany Calling and the Zero Hour: enemy propaganda beamed at Allied listeners, recorded off air as it went out.
19 recordings · 1939–1944
Network pool
Baseball on the Air
Whole ball games as they went out live — the 1948 World Series, the pennant race, nine innings and no highlights package.
14 recordings · 1948–1949
Network pool
Football on the Air
Saturday afternoons and service-network scoreboards — the football broadcasts that made it to tape.
9 recordings · 1951–1974
All India Radio
Voices of Independent India
The broadcasts of independence: Nehru at midnight, and the announcement of Gandhi's death.
5 recordings · 1946–1952
Network pool
The Fights
Ringside, live: the airchecks that survive of the great championship fights.
3 recordings · 1927–1954
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