Paramount Axes Decades Of Comedy Central History In Latest Round Of Brunchlord Dysfunction
from the this-is-all-very-very-broken dept
Last month we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided to eliminate decades of MTV News journalism history as part of their ongoing “cost saving” efforts. It was just the latest casualty in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least competent people imaginable.
We’ve noted how with streaming growth slowing, there’s no longer money to be made goosing stock valuations via subscriber growth. So media giants (and the incompetent brunchlords that usually fail upward into positions of unearned power within them) have turned their attention to all the usual tricks: layoffs, pointless megamergers, price hikes, and more and more weird and costly consumer restrictions.
Part of that equation also involves being too cheap to preserve history, as we’ve seen countless times when a journalism or media company implodes and then immediately disappears not just staffers but decades of their hard work. Usually (and this is from my experience as a freelancer) without any warning or consideration of the impact whatsoever.
Paramount has been struggling after its ingenious strategy of making worse and worse streaming content while charging more and more money somehow hasn’t panned out. While the company looks around for merger and acquisition partners, they’ve effectively taken a hatchet to company staff and history.
First with the recent destruction of the MTV News archives and a major round of layoffs, and now with the elimination of years of Comedy Central history. Last week, as part of additional cost cutting moves, the company basically gutted the Comedy Central website, eliminating years of archived video history of numerous programs ranging from old South Park clips to episodes of the The Colbert Report.
A website message and press statement by the company informs users that they can simply head over to the Paramount+ streaming app to watch older content:
“As part of broader website changes across Paramount, we have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites, driving fans to Paramount+ to watch their favorite shows.”
Except older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report can no longer be found on Paramount+, also due to layoffs and cost cutting efforts at the company. Paramount is roughly $14 billion in debt due to mismanagement, and a recent plan to merge with Skydance was scuttled at the last second.
Eventually Paramount will find somebody else to merge with in order to bump stock valuations, nab a fat tax cut, and justify excessive executive compensation (look at me, I’m a savvy dealmaker!). At which point, as we saw with the disastrous AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery series of mergers, an entirely new wave of layoffs, quality erosion, and chaos will begin as they struggle to pay off deal debt.
It’s all so profoundly pointless, and at no point does anything like product quality, customer satisfaction, employee welfare, or the preservation of history enter into it. The executives spearheading this repeated trajectory from ill-conceived business models to mindless mergers will simply be promoted to bigger and better ventures because there’s simply no financial incentive to learn from historical missteps.
The executives at the top of the heap usually make out like bandits utterly regardless of competency or outcomes, so why change anything?
Filed Under: cbs, comedy central, consolidation, jon stewart, journalism, media, mergers, stephen colbert, streaming
Companies: paramount
Comments on “Paramount Axes Decades Of Comedy Central History In Latest Round Of Brunchlord Dysfunction”
Good thing copyright law lets them do this for the next century give or take. Wouldn’t want any of our culture floating around without some executives getting paid for it in perpetuity.
But… Look at all that job growth! Obviously this wouldn’t have happened if Biden hadn’t snuck in at night and slowly mind controlled them into being woke!
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Ah, yes… job growth. Where companies say they’re hiring and yet no one can actually find one.
Serious question Karl…what do you have against brunch???
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I assume it may have something to do with the oft used managerial practice of providing free coffee and donuts at silly company wide meetings in order to entice the workers into attendance.
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I can’t drink coffee or eat donuts, so I’m not going to bother attending that meeting. Seriously, the amount of times that gluten-free offerings have been cross-contaminated by being placed in the same box as the gluten donuts…
Except...
The merger is back on as of this week.
Re: Merger is closing, except if better offer in 45 days...
…
…
Never Trust a Corporation to do a Library’s Job
-love that line from:
https://medium.com/message/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a-librarys-job-f58db4673351 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0M_p0sv-nU
The Internet Archive has much of this history, if they would just redirect the subdomain to us, we would be happy to keep the links alive as well.
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Thank you. Not specifically for this, but for doing a library’s job.
'If you can't be bothered then I guess the public gets it all early.'
Their actions here provide a very strong argument in favor of once more making copyright opt-in, and requiring a submission of the content in question in order to register a copyright, because if they can’t be bothered to maintain the stuff and therefore their half of the deal that is copyright I see no reason why the content should be lost or they should keep ownership since clearly they don’t see it as valuable.
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Requiring pre-registration for copyright doesn’t hurt the big players, it only hurts individual creators who don’t have legal teams who know the rules, don’t expect their works to be very marketable, and for whom the registration fee is actually significant.
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Who cares? If it’s so important to you, donate 10% of your salary to Internet Archive and manually save all the pages you think merit it.
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Learn to read, dumbshit.
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I’m glad the executives are making out like bandits. It’s inspiring.
Kurt Loder was a Nazi-sympathizer, btw.
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You know the fun part of this? Watching idiots like you starve to death thinking you will end up like the executives who are just making money off of making you poorer.
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Hah. As if. I love watching business and the security state suppress and exploit poor people. Keeps me warm inside.
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I get that you’re desperately trying to be an edgelord about this, but exploiting the poor – particularly in present postmodern day – has to be one of the most self-defeating things you can root for.
The poor, by definition, have limited value or worth that you can even take away. You celebrate taking even that little away, but with no support or foundation to stand on, you don’t even have a pool of grunt workers to do the labor or tasks that the business and security state won’t be seen doing. This happens in every company with horrific employee retention. Eventually even your best performers won’t want to hang around either.
It’s not like this is news. That’s exactly what happened to X and Tesla. Those who refused to be exploited got the sack, and those who remained either saw the writing on the wall and left, or took selfies of the sleeping bags they had under their desk to show how slavishly devoted they were to their work – and then they got the sack too. Sawing off your own legs is morbidly funny only up to a point.
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You are the poor people. You’re laughing at yourself. And so are we.
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Why was this truth censored? It was rightfully demeaning and insulting a rightoid.
Hiding such speech veers dangerously close to homophobia.
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This has to be satire pointing out the absurdity of the lengths one must go to simply to preserve cultural heritage for the benefit of society. In which case, bravo.
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If the lack of tithing resources to causes deemed worthy merits criticism of one’s character, then the obscenely wealthy are some of the most morally repugnant individuals on the planet.
I highly doubt that’s what you were going for, though.
A company nowdays only cares about IP itself, not the content that could be made with IP.
Company: “Aayyy, it’s IP, aaayyyy!”
Consumer: “Are you going to make any good shows out of it?”
Company: “…Aayyy, it’s IP, aaayyyy!”
You forgot something
Paramount can do no wrong as it owns Star Trek. It used to be that NBC and CBS could do no wrong, but now Paramount can do no wrong. It is all because they follow the principles laid out and featured in the Star Trek to the letter. You may think they don’t, but they in fact do.
They’re closely following the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
Simple solution: allow “piracy” for works which are not available on the market. There are no “lost sales due to piracy” if something isn’t for sale anyway.
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Or just abolish copyright entirely.
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Or just bring our copyright regime in line with what our Constitution says it’s actually meant to do.
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Some years after copyright was created, the Constitution was amended to contain a right to free speech. So, in some sense, abolition is what the Constitution says about copyright, and courts have just been ignoring that.
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Arguing that copyright is against the Constitution simply because it was added before the First Amendment is the same as arguing against all First Amendment exceptions because they were added after the prohibition on abridging the freedom of speech. With that thought in mind, I now understand how Trump got off with fomenting an insurrection: there must be a bunch of people that think like you in Congress.
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At this point that’s increasingly looking like the better option than what we’ve got now, barring a major overhaul of the entire system.
nothing new
Its always been that way about the CC website.
Back in November 2000 I was on the front page with a writeup, when I was working on their number2 show, BattleBots; was me “robo-rat-boy”, and Jay Leno. A year or two later, I asked if I could have a copy of the site, or a screenshot, or something, and was told ‘nope’, because they didn’t keep/archive anything like that.
So its nothing new. And a few years ago, when CBS went into the fold ,I asked my BinL about it (he was one of their storage experts) and he said they weren’t archiving anything then.