Paramount Kills ‘MTV News’ Archives, Because Who Cares About History?
from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept
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.
Filed Under: brunchlords, consolidation, history, internet archive, media, mtv, mtv news, preservation
Companies: cbs, paramount
Comments on “Paramount Kills ‘MTV News’ Archives, Because Who Cares About History?”
Any chance that the website was save to the Internet Archive? I’d love to imagine greedy execs’ faces as they watch everyone visiting archive.org instead of mtv.com.
Re:
Why do you think they’ll care?
Probably there’s some stuff on archive.org, but if you’ve used it, you’ll know that things are usually only partially archived. There are bound to be broken links.
But there’s no reason to think the “execs” did this to spite us, or to make the stories disappear, or anything like that. It’s probably just an expense that brought them nothing of value; to stop distributing stuff won’t even cost them the copyrights.
There were about 7 billion people who effectively decided that MTV News was not worth saving; the people who shut it down were just the ones who’d been paying the bill until then. It doesn’t help that people, in general, are supporting their own victimization by paying for copyrighted stuff, and by agreeing to create stuff they’ll have no rights to do anything with. Still, whether legal or not, journalists should always save copies of their own work; if they don’t think it’s worth the dollar of storage space it’d cost, how surprised can they be that faceless corporations don’t value it?
Re: Re:
Indeed…
I’d argue that the trajectory is directly linked to two things — the copyright act of 1976 and the shift in corporate personhood thinking that started in the 1980s and led eventually to Citizens United.
Re: Re:
Links most often get broken when the stuff on the other end of them disappears, a problem solved by the Internet Archive. For the most popular sites, the Internet Archive has bots on the job, eliminating human error unless MTV News had a bots.txt file, which I doubt (greedy execs think it’s much better to get a link tax instituted than to block the automated generation of links).
Re: Re: Re:
It’s a problem they aim to solve. But if you regularly look up old data, you’ll know that they don’t get everything. I’ve found many an old page missing some or all of its images, for example, even when the IMG tags refer to the same domain as the successfully-archived page.
Hell, they won’t even take everything when I’m trying to feed it to them. I had to loop a wget script with some web.archive.org/save links like 20 times over several days to get around their rate-limiting; it wasn’t particularly recent, nor restricted by robots.txt or otherwise, but the Wayback Machine didn’t have it yet and was choosing to give HTTP errors itself.
Re: Re: Re:2
Don’t act like a bot and you won’t get blocked like one.
Re: Re: Re:2
If there is a shutdown announcement and a group called archiveteam gets that info quick enough the chances are hhigh that the site gets saved nearly full. they don’t use the save page now and instead deliver the data directly
Re: Re:
This right here. As with any computer hardware, including storage of some sort, it’s not a matter of if, it’s only a matter of when things go titsup. The wetware that caused this particular loss is on the same level playing field as the journalist – cost for storage is cost for storage, no matter where it’s stored.
Cost for continual dissemination was all that counted for those that pulled the plug, and we, both the consuming public and the original sources of that content, have no right to insist that they foot the bill forever.
Re: Re: Re:
Exactly!
your(my) work is so unimportant that we(I) can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum to preserve it. It’s so unimportant, we’re(I’m) not going to even spend a relative pittance to archive it.
Paramount also took the hatchet to Comedy Central and wiped out tons of content there such as Colbert Report and Daily Show. It seems they are going through all their properties and disappearing any old content.
Also to add… and those who obtained any of this content through other means remain unaffected.
History
I remember, in my far distant youth, reading a Sci-Fi story about humans discovering the remains of a long extinct alien civilisation. They find an archive with thousands of years of the aliens’ history in data storage enabling them (us) to learn about their lives. I can’t help wondering, in a few decades from now, when the human race has gone extinct, will there be any of our history left for possible aliens to discover and learn about our lives?
Re:
Human history will be filled with AI SEO gibberish and stupid ads. Aliens will think that machines were invented by a greater civilization, and theses machines have erased the Humanity long before we’ve could invented writing.
One question will remain to Aliens: what could be this “Viagra” that machines spew a billion times every second?
Re:
Like any good archeologist will tell you…
Our trash. (Plastic is going to last a long time)
Re:
Things written onto stone tables will likely still be around.
Re: Artifacts
There will be artifacts on the Moon, that could be potentially discovered.
There will be no artifacts to be found on Earth in a billion years because another Snowball Earth will grind them all away to be subducted into the mantle.
Re: Re: Nice to Think
If the Earth melted, and all that was left was the moon – there’d be one plaque found, “We came in peace for all mankind” on Apollo 11, carrying the only surviving names : Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and… Richard Nixon, president of the USA.
There’s also the plaque on Voyager, contain a recording from Kurt Waldheim, UN Secretary General and former Nazi.
Re:
Hopefully, nothing but our trash.
Re: Re:
Ah yes…misanthropy. The most rational response to anything, and something that would actually save us if everyone accepted it. /s
Re: Re: Re:
If the extinction of the human race is considered salvation, yes.
Re: Re: Re:
Misanthropes are like the edgy teenagers who never grew out of their “No, fuck you, Dad!” phase and genuinely think that their rebellious outbursts aren’t infantile ignorance, but intellectual ambrosia that obviously nobody else has ever thought of before. Meanwhile they don’t have the gumption to actually pursue their ideals to the logical conclusion and extinctionize or unalive themselves. They hate everyone, they hate you, and they hate themselves, just not enough to actually go through with anything.
Re: What is old is new again
Ironically, the most primitive technology will probably last the longest.
Links die quick.
Hard drives die in a few years.
Microfilm can last a long time with good storage conditions.
Parchment/vellum lasts a damn long time.
And what was written in stone will be written, in, well, stone.
The unit for loss of culture should be the Alexandria ─ about 400,000 items by one estimate. My guess is we’re currently going at a rate of an Alexandria per day, internet-wide.
Re:
This comment is one of the best things I’ve ever read on this site. I vehemently second the motion because it not only is a readily-quantifiable amount, but because it provides much-needed historical perspective. As an archivist (for a nonprofit organization) I’m appalled by this rampant destruction, made all the worse because surely the people doing it know that others would archive it FOR FREE if only given the opportunity.
We live in a time when the cost of archiving (and presenting) static content on the web continues to drop while simultaneously the wanton disregard for our history and culture continues to increase.
Re: Re:
Others did archive stuff for free, until Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley worked hard to cause a 1.25-Alexandria loss.
Sad, MTV News was one of the best things to come out of MTV, their coverage was actually good. And a heck of a lot more real than their “reality TV” shows.
So.. once again the world will turn to those they have shunned and shackled to return to them that which was taken so unjustly by faceless overlords.
Avast! We be Pirates of the great Information Seas these days.
Re:
As long as you don’t get caught, there’s actually no obligation to follow shitty laws.
Deleting their AI data sets
25+ Years of Daily Show Clips Gone as Paramount Axes Comedy Central Site
CMT’s gone too.
Re:
Cmt? What’s that stand for, cutting my toes?
This is giving my flashbacks of when I was starting Freezenet. One of the major projects I worked on (that probably almost no one was aware of at the time) was to preserve past articles I wrote for sites like Slyck and ZeroPaid (like a fool, I didn’t save everything I wrote locally when I was writing those articles at the time). I couldn’t really save everything, but I was able to save a vast majority of everything I wrote. I knew I couldn’t copy anyone else’s content as I didn’t think I had the rights to.
While Slyck was still up at the time of me capturing my work (which unceremoniously erased my name for every article I wrote), I had to partly rely on Archive.org to get everything I wrote on ZeroPaid because some of my articles in the past had oddly vanished. The capture wasn’t perfect and I lost a handful of articles as a result, but I was able to save a majority of my work.
I then dumped everything I captured onto my site (I believe 873 articles in all) in an effort to preserve at least a slice of the past. It was a good thing I did because Slyck would eventually disappear into the ether and, apart from whatever archive.org captured, my site is now probably the only one preserving even a piece of the past of both websites.
It was a really awful feeling seeing my own work just vanish like that, but I was relieved I was able to save a really good chunk of it at least.
I know it’s easy to just think that archive.org will save and preserve everything, but in my experience, even on a popular website, it doesn’t save everything. Sometimes, the internet does, indeed, forget.
Re:
Your comment seems to assume archive.org is just the Wayback Machine, which crawls the web and does have a tendency to miss stuff. (That’s actually web.archive.org.)
There’s a whole other side to the site. It seems to be kind of falling apart recently, with the home page redirecting to a 404 error today and the search feature having been broken since around February 2023 (always redirecting back to itself, with no results, not that it was ever very good). But I think the upload feature still works, and downloading’s been fine. Anyone who wants their data archived can directly upload it, possibly in bulk.
Re: Re:
Both the home page and the search feature work for me.
Re: Re: Re:
The home page redirects me to https://archive.org/?noscript=true which gives me “404 Not Found”. Does that URL work for you?
Re: Re: Re:2
Try the following link: https://archive.org/
Mandatory Deposit
This is why the Copyright Act has section 407, right? https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap4.html#407
Would be nice if corporations weren’t allowed to enforce their copyrights if they didn’t submit a copy of the work to the Library of Congress.
'Historical records don't make us money today, axe them.'
Another data point in the argument that if culture is to survive it will be because of copyright infringement rather than in spite of it.
People are still shocked at corporations doing corporate shit? shrug
Re:
Who the fuck said anything about being shocked?
Adam Lockerdy
SAM Juli Gmmady Lockerdy Jasmine Jennie BilLockerdy Lockerdy comment options: Use markdown. Use plain text. Firs word or Las Word. No thanks. &et credits or si$n in to see balance/ balance on this account for a while but not sure what to expect from the rest since I don’t think it’s the best option Jo would Jo. Jo and I have some of the same thing going for the same thing as the other day I just wanted you guys know how it goes and I think it will be good if we don’t get it out until the end but I’m sure we can make it happen if you want it and we can get the same thing for you if that’s what you want it just be a good deal for me and you know I don’t want it to be honest I just want to be fair to be honest and honest about it and I know I don’t think I just want it all right ifytghgfdhgfghhhhsddhegrsdgggf
Jsussjsjjsjwnwiwiwjwjwjwjwjwjwjjwjajskskskakakak