When I was a kid I really wanted to know things. I would ride my ten-speed to the library in our little suburban Massachusetts town, say "hi" to Mrs. Johnson the librarian, and scour the card catalog to find things I didn't know. I liked maps and old history. I liked fiction and stories about girls my age. I liked tales of adventure told by great American men. As I grew up, my obsession with libraries was unceasing and I discovered that if you looked deep enough, there were records of everything. In college, I poured over microfilm of old issues of The New York Times or defunct old news outlets like the Philadelphia Tribune that were kept in storage but hadn't been publishing for years, sometimes decades. Kids who are hungry for knowledge of the past will find gaping holes in those records: all beginning with the erasure of MTV News.
Analog records have lasting power, check out the Dead Sea Scrolls for evidence. Now, as we trust more and more of our history to the internet, the potential for a digital dark age looms, where our history is lost not due to fire, flood or famine, but to penny-pinching execs who just don't want to pay to keep the archive of humanity in existence. AI generated content is a perpetual regurgitation machine that becomes increasingly useless, as the records on which feeds are eliminated from the internet.
Archives should never disappear or be eliminated. Now MTV News has been entirely removed from the internet, the only real archive we have in our ephemeral contemporary era. The records of over twenty years of pop culture journalism from the pre-social media era through to when the network ceased production last year are lost forever. All those records are just gone, wiped from servers, inaccessible.
That knowledge of what culture looked like, of what the younger generation thought of itself, of our popular arts and music, those key stories we told about ourselves in our fleeting present are entirely erased. This is nothing short of a tragedy, it is the burning of books, the torching of libraries, the snapping of the rope that ties us to who we were.
We all heard the story of the Library at Alexandria that was sacked and burned during the Crusades and lament the knowledge lost. When fragments of old scrolls are discovered by archeologists we're all curious to know what our ancient ancestors deemed worthy enough to write down and keep. The stories of our past are how we know where we came from, what we expected of ourselves, how we landed where we are, and how to understand where we're going.
A practice that seemed commonplace, digging into original source materials, now seems like a remnant of a past era that will never exist again. These were my first thoughts when I heard that MTV News was not only taken off the air, but all record of their content was removed by Paramount Global. It's one thing to stop publishing, but it's quite another to eliminate the archives—more than two decades worth of it. Music journalism, interviews with artists, producers, fans, alt-media reactions to major world events like 9/11, the Iraq war, Obama, Trump, and so much more. Paramount also pulled archives for country music outlet CMT. The stuff is not even available in the Wayback Machine.
It's certainly possible that in the grand scheme of things, MTV News is not a very big deal. MTV News, started in the late 1980s with The Week in Rock, was a broadcast program on a cable station that was launched simply to play music videos. The fact of the matter was that the only reason they turned to broadcast programming was so that they'd have something to show in the TV Guide listings of what was airing when and because they needed to sell advertising, which was hard to do when the programming was nothing but endless blocks of music videos. Many of us loved endless blocks of music videos. I'd take my boom box up to the tv room and record songs onto audio cassettes trying not to make any shuffling sounds against the carpet as I sat, as motionless as I could muster, right beneath the tv speakers.
But I even liked MTV News. It was far different from the "news you can use" broadcasts of the era. MTV News was not even in the same media ecosphere as those monotonous broadcasts of pundits arguing over politics or foreign wars. While my step-mom watched endless hours of CNN's coverage of the Iraq War, Operation Desert Storm, with the perpetual video of the smart bomb falling down a chimney somewhere in a land I could barely place on a map, MTV News offered glimpses into American culture as a phenomenon more powerful than bombs or armies, full of life, sarcasm, irony and youth. There was a place in it for me, a kid in a nondescript suburb who lived for 120 Minutes on Sunday night and dreamed of leaving my small town for the most alive place I knew, New York.
We've trusted too much of ourselves, our stories, our history, and our present to a form of data storage that is designed for the present moment, not the future, not the past. And as we know, there is no present, there are only fleeting seconds that we anticipate and remember, but never quite exist within. When we lose it all, when it turns out we know nothing because we can collectively remember nothing, when it turns out we are fragmented and fractured beyond all recognition, we will know it's because the stewards to whom we entrusted our precious past simply did not care to preserve it.
