WASHINGTON - July 16 - Pacifica Network's Democracy Now! will air A Passel of Pomp and a Circus of Circumstance: Historic Conventions Coverage, a five-part radio/TV special on the vital and sometimes turbulent history of American Presidential conventions.

Produced by the Pacifica Radio Archives (PRA), this special series with dramatic historical footage edited by Democracy Now! airs Monday, July 19th thru Friday, July 23rd on the more than 230 radio and TV stations nationwide broadcasting Democracy Now!

Award-winning journalist, best-selling author and host of Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman narrates the documentary, which spans more than 65 years of convention coverage and chronicles milestones in American political history.

From the formal speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, to the battles inside and outside the Chicago 1968 convention and the radical sounds of Rage Against the Machine in the streets of Los Angeles in 2000, the documentary showcases the Pacifica Network's progressive reporting at its most daring. It includes highlights of the Republican and Democratic conventions, as well as the Mississippi Freedom Party convention in the '60s, and the Shadow Conventions of 2000.

"The Pacifica Archives are a national treasure -- a vast narrative of the grassroots, social justice struggles that have made this country what it is," says host Amy Goodman. The collection comprises almost 50,000 tapes dating from the '50s through today, many of them extremely rare.

Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 230 stations in North America. Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the U.S., Democracy Now! is broadcast on Pacifica, community, and National Public Radio stations, public access cable television stations, satellite television (on Free Speech TV, channel 9415 of the DISH Network and Link TV, channel 375 of DIRECTV), short wave radio, and the internet.

Selected Highlights from A Passel of Pomp and a Circus of Circumstance:

* 1936 President Franklin D Roosevelt

* 1948 Rep. Claire Booth-Luce (R-CT)

* 1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower

* 1956 Adlai Stevenson, Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-MA)

* 1964 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X

* 1968 Sen. Wayne Morse (D-OR) anti-war speech,

Bobby Seale, Black Panther Party, Chicago's Lincoln Park protests

* 1972 President Richard M. Nixon and protests in Miami

* 1980 Governor Ronald Reagan

* 1984 Geraldine Ferraro, Rev. Jesse Jackson

* 2000 Ralph Nader, Green Party at RNC, Sen. Paul Wellstone at Shadow Convention

Democracy Now! expanded two-hour daily coverage of the 2004 Democratic Convention begins July 26th thru July 30th from the Democratic Party Convention in Boston- Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency, with reporting from inside and outside the conventions from the corporate suites to the people's streets.

FOR WEBCAST or to find local times/listings on TV/radio stations broadcasting Democracy Now! go to http://www.democracynow.org.

For more information about PRA or to purchase a copy of "A Passel of Pomp and a Circus of Circumstance" go to http://pacificaradioarchives.org.

TO LISTEN TO HIGHLIGHT CLIPS ON-LINE:

http://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/ram/pomp1clip.mp3 (for downloading) or

http://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/ram/pomp1clip.m3u (for streaming)

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