If you’re a member of Generation X, you surely remember seeing clips of MTV News between music videos, back when MTV played music videos.
Paramount, which owns the outlet, has just made a bunch of fresh cuts, and MTV News didn’t make it.
The Hollywood Reporter has the story:
MTV News Signs Off for Good After 36-Year RunThirty-six years after MTV News was created to expand the stable of programming that defined the cable channel MTV, it is no more.MTV News was shuttered this week as part of larger layoffs at parent company Paramount Global.What launched as a single show in 1987 (The Week in Rock, led by correspondent Kurt Loder) eventually became a bona fide news outlet for Gen X and older millennials who found that traditional TV programming on the broadcast networks and CNN wasn’t cutting it.Correspondents like Loder, Tabitha Soren, SuChin Pak, Gideon Yago, Alison Stewart and others covered music, pop culture, politics and other topics with an eye toward the younger generation that was tuned to MTV, rather than the network evening newscasts.Along the way, MTV News created some pop culture moments itself, perhaps none bigger than in 1994, when President Clinton appeared on MTV’s Enough Is Enough, a town hall addressing violence in America.The special was led by Soren and Stewart and saw them, as well as audience members in attendance, asking questions of Clinton about fighting crime and balancing personal freedom with social responsibility. But it was a section of lighter questions and answers that made national headlines, when an audience member asked Clinton, “Mr. President, the world’s dying to know, is it boxers or briefs?”“Usually briefs. I can’t believe she did that,” Clinton responded, to laughter from the crowd.
Lots of people forgot that there even was such a thing as MTV News.
They did cover some big stories over the years, however, including the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994.
The closure of MTV News won’t have a major impact on our current media environment, but it was definitely a part of American culture that had an impact for people of a certain age.
Featured image via YouTube.
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