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Now, a generation after MTV News bridged the gap between news and pop culture, Paramount, the network’s parent company, announced this week that it was shuttering the news service.
The end of MTV’s news operation is part of a 25% reduction in Paramount’s staff, Chris McCarthy, president and CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, said in an email to staff that was shared with The New York Times.
MTV News and its cadre of anchors and video journalists were the ones to tell young people about the suicide of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and the killings of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. They brought viewers on the presidential campaign trail. They also embraced the messy chaos of 1990s and early 2000s celebrity. They always put music first.
Through it all, MTV News never strayed from its core mission of centering the conversation around young people.
MTV News broke up the television news environment “in terms of young versus old, hip versus square,” rather than the conservative-versus-liberal approach of many cable news networks today, said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University. Its influence can be seen in the work of Vice News, the brash digital-media disrupter, and in the hand-held camcorder style of reporting that some CNN journalists have embraced.
The Music Television network debuted in 1981 like a “fuse that lit the cable revolution,” Thompson said. Six years later, MTV News came on air under the deep, sure-footed voice of Kurt Loder, a former Rolling Stone editor, who co-hosted a weekly news program called “The Week in Rock.”
But it was his interrupting-regular-programming announcement of Cobain’s death in 1994 that cemented Loder as “the poet laureate of Gen X,” Thompson said.
MTV News tried to set itself apart from other cable news operations in a number of ways, Loder said. MTV News anchors and correspondents did not wear suits. They also weren’t “self-righteous” and tried “not to talk down to the audience,” he said.
