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Democracy Now! Transcript Scraper

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Democracy Now! Transcript Scraper

Extract full transcripts from Democracy Now! — the daily independent news program broadcast since 1996. Each record contains the complete segment transcript with speaker labels, guest names and bios, topic tags, duration, and Creative Commons license metadata.

All content is published by Democracy Now! under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US (Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives). License fields are emitted on every record.

What You Get

Each output record represents one segment from the daily show:

Field Description
show_date Episode date (YYYY-MM-DD)
segment_title Segment headline
segment_slug URL slug (e.g. trump_elections)
segment_url Canonical page URL
segment_order Position within the day's show (1-based)
duration_seconds Segment length in seconds
hosts Show hosts (comma-separated)
guests Guest names (comma-separated)
guest_descriptors Guest biographical descriptions
topics Tagged topics (comma-separated)
body_text Full plain-text transcript with speaker labels
body_html Original transcript HTML with speaker spans
speakers Unique speaker labels extracted from transcript
related_segment_urls Related segment links
cc_license CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US
cc_license_url Link to the CC license
source democracynow.org
scraped_at ISO 8601 scrape timestamp

Sample Output

{
  "show_date": "2026-05-08",
  "segment_slug": "trump_elections",
  "segment_url": "https://www.democracynow.org/2026/5/8/trump_elections",
  "segment_title": "Trump Pushes to Take Over Elections, Punish His Enemies: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Reporter Ned Parker",
  "segment_summary": "A new Reuters investigation details how the Trump administration is seeking federal control over elections in at least eight states...",
  "segment_order": 1,
  "duration_seconds": 1127,
  "hosts": "Amy Goodman",
  "guests": "Ned Parker",
  "guest_descriptors": "Reuters investigative reporter.",
  "topics": "Voting, Donald Trump, 2020 Election, Arizona, Georgia",
  "body_text": "AMY GOODMAN: Tennessee's Republican-dominated state Legislature...",
  "speakers": "AMY GOODMAN, NED PARKER",
  "cc_license": "CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US",
  "cc_license_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/",
  "source": "democracynow.org",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-11T09:39:30.311Z"
}

Input Options

Parameter Type Default Description
startDate string 2026-05-08 Start date (YYYY-MM-DD)
endDate string 2026-05-08 End date (YYYY-MM-DD)
maxItems integer 10 Maximum records to return

Date range crawl: Set startDate and endDate to crawl a span of days. For a 30-year backfill, the site has ~50,000 total segment records — set maxItems: 0 for no cap.

Note: Democracy Now! broadcasts Monday–Friday. Weekend dates return no segments.

License Notice

Democracy Now! publishes all original content under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US):

  • Attribution required — credit Democracy Now!
  • Non-commercial use only
  • No derivatives — content may not be modified and redistributed

Research, academic, indexing, and editorial reuse with attribution is permitted. Commercial training-data products incorporating the raw transcripts require separate permission from Democracy Now! This license is more restrictive than CC BY-SA — confirm your use case before bulk extraction.

Performance

  • No proxy required — Democracy Now! is openly accessible with no bot protection
  • Concurrency: 3 concurrent requests (~1 req/sec, courteous default)
  • Throughput: ~240 segments/hour at default concurrency
  • Memory: 256 MB

Use Cases

  • Academic and journalistic corpus construction (CC license makes attribution clear)
  • Political science and media studies research
  • Speaker diarization training data (clean NAME: turn boundaries)
  • Topic modeling and trend analysis (structured topic tags since 1996)
  • Archival and preservation pipelines

Need More Features?

File an issue or contact us at orbtop.com — we're happy to add fields, extend date-range support, or build a custom variant for your use case.

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