MTV News has been scrubbed from the internet amid rumored financial troubles plaguing the site’s parent company, Paramount Global. All related content has also been eliminated from the web. MTV News was 37 years old.
Launched in 1987 as a standalone program called “The Week in Rock” with Kurt Loder, MTV News quickly grew into a platform for the cool kids to get their topical music news. However, by the 1990s, MTV News was delivering hard-hitting profiles such as “Hate Rock,” which provided viewers with “a sober assessment of the forces that have combined to create a league of race-baiting, post-punk skinheads,” per a 1993 review from the LA Times.
MTV News was so prevalent in American pop culture that in 1992, all three presidential candidates—George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot—appeared on the program as part of their campaign trails. It was where Loder famously asked Clinton “Boxers or briefs?” and also where he reported that Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994.
Loder delivered the news with solemn professionalism, and many compared the moment to Walter Cronkite breaking the news that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, according to a report from Seattle Times. MTV News transcended expectations, blurring the lines of what news reporting could be. Delivering the news could be light and fun, but there was also a time for the seriousness of traditional reporting. The program balanced both aspects of the news, overall providing entertainment but knowing how to read the room.
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The Downfall and Eventual Death of MTV News
That similar balanced reporting was seen in the structures of Vice News and Buzzfeed News, but with more of an edge. Those outlets dared to tread further than MTV News, and the old standard began to fall behind. Van Toffler, former architect of MTV and President of Viacom Music at the time, left the company in 2015. Restructuring and emergence of social media and YouTube began to drag MTV News down further.
Despite a revitalization plan in 2017, MTV News just wasn’t getting there fast enough. Other outlets were taking over, social media was becoming the new journalism, and people just weren’t watching or reading MTV News like they used to.
Since then, Buzzfeed News has shut down. There isn’t as much of a market for online news outlets anymore, and MTV News has felt the heat. According to the Seattle Times, Paramount Global recently revealed that it had a net loss of $1.1 billion in the first quarter of 2024. This led to the shuttering of MTV News so Paramount could focus on its streaming media.
MTV News was a paragon of music reporting in the late 80s and through the early 2000s. It had the structure and the anchors to take it to new heights that news programs weren’t reaching at the time. As we continue to live in an age where online entertainment and news outlets are dying off in droves every day, we can take a moment to remember a time when people actually got their news from television programs, newspapers, and magazines.
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