This article presents the results of a project completed in May, 2005 at the University of California, Berkeley to measure the accessibility of historic television broadcasts. The first section describes a model of the accessibility of news and entertainment broadcasts, and the second section applies this model in an attempted reconstruction of the interaction on television between then-U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle and the fictional character Murphy Brown. The final section compares the results with the ruling in Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corp.