UCLA Irv Drasnin and Xiaoyan Zhao Drasnin Communication Archive
Uncover hidden treasures from history’s archives
We are grateful to UCLA alumnus Irv Drasnin, a broadcast journalist and documentarian, and his wife Xiaoyan Zhao Drasnin, a communication researcher and writer for their gift establishing the UCLA Irv and Xiaoyan Zhao Drasnin Communication Archive.
Originally a newspaper reporter, Irv Drasnin became a writer, producer and director for daily news programs, including the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, where his assignments ranged from “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, the passage of the Voting Rights Act and NASA’s Project Mercury 6, the first U.S.-crewed space flight program. He went on to create 30 documentaries for CBS News and PBS, including the Emmy-winning “A Black View of South Africa” and the DGA and WGA awards-winning “The Guns of Autumn.”
Earning her Ph.D. in communication from Stanford, Xiaoyan Zhao Drasnin became the senior vice president and global director of research and consulting at GfK Roper Public Affairs, conducting research that spanned over 60 countries including public diplomacy projects for the U.S. State Department and delivering presentations around the globe to clients that included the United Nations and World Bank. A writer and poet, she is now focusing on creative works, including a novel set in 1960s China.
Many groups and organizations have helped contribute to this project over several decades, including the UCLA Department of Communication, Dean of Social Sciences, and the Chancellor. We are particularly indebted to the UCLA Library, which has provided physical and digital infrastructure and assistance for the project, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive for stewardship of their News and Public Affairs (NAPA) collection. Grants were also provided by the National Science Foundation, the California Endowment, and UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate.
As part of their generous gift to establish the UCLA Drasnin Communication Archive, Irv and Xiaoyan Drasnin provided UCLA with copies of dozens of Irv’s documentaries and an extensive array of supporting background material (raw footage, scripts, edits, etc.), which will be digitized and hosted on this page in the future.
The UCLA Drasnin Communication Archive will also include several other collections, including:
- The NewsScape television news archive. Beginning in the 1970s with the televised Watergate hearings, Prof. Paul Rosenthal dedicated himself to preserving television news for future generations. UCLA has continued to pursue that mission–expanding the collection with hundreds of thousands of hours of Los Angeles local, national, cable, and international news and public affairs programs including holdings from the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s NAPA collection. Thanks to the Drasnin’s generous gift, many of the recordings in the enormous analog back catalog will be digitized over the next three years and–beginning in Spring 2025–the UCLA Library is planning to provide a public search engine for the collection. Researchers interested in gaining access to the current digitized programs can contact Tim Groeling to discuss access.
- The UCLA Campus Speakers Collection. Beginning in the 1950s, our faculty began recording hundreds of famous speakers who visited UCLA, including Martin Luther King, Jr., J. Robert Oppenheimer and Mae West. These audio recordings have been uploaded to YouTube, where they have been viewed more than 4 million times. The YouTube channel also includes playlists of commercials drawn from the archive, historic news stories, and documentaries.
- The Telco Files: In partnership with the LA Unified School District, we have been digitizing the analog catalog of the Telco Report, which was donated to UCLA in the 1980s. The cards in the collection tracked television productions throughout the world. When the collection has been digitized, we will link to it here.
- Great Weekend: Great Weekend was a 1988 syndicated Saturday-morning “soft news” program produced by USTV/Hubbard Broadcasting. The show lasted one season, and then donated their content to UCLA. Many of these tapes are now available in a playlist on our YouTube channel.
Background documents and other supporting material donated by the Drasnins will be hosted here after digitization.
UCLA’s Communication Archive has been preserving and protecting historic media content for more than a half-century. Our collections include recordings of campus speakers at UCLA and historic news content. Beginning with the Watergate Hearings, our Department has worked to preserve our collective memory of vital events in our history. Through this content on YouTube, we are sharing this work with the public.
