Paramount shuts down MTV News Archives in big blow to music history
Paramount’s decision to shut down the MTV News archives marks a significant loss for media history enthusiasts. Karl Bode dives into the implications of this move and what it means for preserving iconic moments in pop culture journalism.
Paramount (CBS) Corporation this week simply erased decades of music journalism in the blink of an eye. Last year the company shut down MTV News and fired all its staff as part of a “strategic realignment.” This week, without warning, the company deleted the entirety of the MTV News archives, erasing decades of music journalism without much in the way of any warning.
In a scene that’s been repeated constantly in the last decade, journalists watched helplessly as stuff they’d spent years of their life working on simply disappeared:
As a freelance reporter myself I’ve lost track of the number of websites I’ve worked for that unceremoniously deleted countless hours of work without a second thought (tech news outlet Protocol being among the most recent, though my work at Vice’s Motherboard will soon meet the same fate). Sometimes somebody can be bothered to archive the content; usually it’s left up to the authors.
It’s part of a broader disdain for journalism by those with wealth and power, and sends a very clear message: your work is so unimportant that we can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum to preserve it. It’s so unimportant, we’re not going to even spend a relative pittance to archive it. We’re not even going to give you a heads’ up so that you can archive it yourself.
Like many companies in streaming, Paramount has been looking for a merger partner after its strategy of making worse and worse content at a higher and higher price point apparently stopped paying dividends. Streaming growth has slowed, so most of these companies have taken a cue from traditional cable and have started focusing intently on nickel-and-diming users and large, pointless mergers.
The AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery merger highlighted very clearly how modern media industry brunchlords care primarily about three things: the impossibility of unlimited growth, tax cuts, and massive compensation incommensurate with any sort of actual competence. There were no shortage of loved products (like Mad Magazine) and projects that were pointlessly dismantled by the AT&T saga.
The assumption is that stuff like the Internet Archive will just magically come in and preserve our collective history in the wake of executive apathy. But that’s simply not the case; as archivists are facing their own constant array of existential challenges in an era of increasingly unchecked corporate power, a corrupt and dysfunctional Congress, and unlimited narcissistic manbaby multi-billionaires.
Not that MTV News was dismantling structures of corrupted power all that often, but this deterioration of journalistic history more broadly tends to primarily serve corporate power, and the kinds of folks who’d very much like it if future generations didn’t learn much from the history of lived experience and past policy debates.
The disdain for journalistic history is happening at the same time we’re steadily replacing real journalism and insight with badly automated “AI” ad engagement simulacrum, which not only supplants actual expertise, but redirects limited resources away from real reporting. Collectively the trajectory (which really is part of a U.S. media continuum stretching back to the 80s) couldn’t be any uglier… or any more clear.
