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.