Nolte: Paramount Deletes MTV News Website and Archives

NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 8: (L-R) MTV News Correspondent Gaby Wilson, NAACP Youth Director
Brad Barket/Getty Images for MTV News

Last May, the far-left MTV News was just one of many left-wing news outlets that closed down forever (tee hee). A year later, Paramount (MTV’s owner) has now taken it a delicious step further. The MTV News website and its archives have been deleted.

Wow. Some 20 years of puddle-shallow, left-wing propaganda and snark written and published by know-nothings who believe the real world is a reality show are gone forever with the touch of a button.

Is this a great country, or what?

“Some two decades’ worth of content published on MTVNews.com is no longer available after MTV appears to have fully pulled down the site and its related content,” reports the far-left Variety.

“As of Monday,” Variety continues, “trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.”

“So, mtvnews.com no longer exists. Eight years of my life are gone without a trace,” xweeted one former MTV  News staffer. “All because it didn’t fit some executives’ bottom lines. Infuriating is too small a word.”

A writer for the disgraced Rolling Stone added his own harrumph: “This is disgraceful. They’ve completely wiped the MTV News archive. Decades of pop culture history research material gone, and why?” He added, “[O]lder articles don’t even turn up on the Wayback machine. Just a total wipe-out. Really despicable.”

You gotta love the bloated sense of self-importance here. You know, I’ve been writing online for 20 years now, and I could not care less if all of it is deleted. Two or three websites from way back in my Dirty Harry days are probably gone forever. I sure wasn’t going to pay to keep all the bad writing alive … forever.

And what kind of idiot relies on a multinational corporation to handle their oh-so precious archives? If you want to preserve your work, you had better do it yourself.

And come on, did we really lose anything here? MTV News was a long way from its cool and necessary roots when Kurt Loder delivered the scoops and interviews in a straightforward and professional way. People are acting like Paramount just flushed the Dead Sea Scrolls down the toilet. Believe me, 21st-century pop culture is not lacking in coverage or record-keeping.

Good grief, at least be humble enough to admit that in the scheme of things, what we do doesn’t matter. If everyone who does what I do for a living disappeared tomorrow, the world would keep turning just fine. Some of you might miss me for a while, but before long, I’d be what’s-his-name-who-hated-CNN.

In two weeks, no one will even remember a post-Kurt Loder MTV News even existed.

Hey, maybe if you’d learned to code, you would’ve known how to create your own archives of thousands of posts that don’t matter and no one read, not even your mom (she lied about reading your stuff).

John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook

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