Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.
Every Daily Show episode since Jon Stewart took over as host in 1999? Disappeared. The historic remains of The Colbert Report? Disappeared. Presumably, one hopes, those materials remain archived internally somewhere, but for the general masses, they’re kaput. Instead, the links redirect visitors to Paramount+, a streaming service whose offerings pale in comparison. (The service offers recent seasons of the Daily Show to paying subscribers, but only a fraction of the prior archive.)
Such digital demolitions are becoming routine. For fans and scholars of pop culture, 2024 may go down as the year the internet shrank. Despite the immense archiving capabilities of the internet, we’re living through an age of mass deletion, a moment when entertainment and media corporations see themselves not as custodians of valuable cultural history, once freely available, but as ruthless maximisers of profit. Those of us who believe in the historical value of accessing media from the past are paying the price.
Consider how much digital damage has been done in recent months. That same June, the archives of the now-defunct MTVNews.com, which served as a monument to nearly three decades of music journalism, went dark without warning. Then, in August, Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) scrubbed the contents of Cartoon Network’s video-heavy website, a portal of clips and show episodes that had existed since 1998 and that now redirects to Max (formerly HBO Max).
For that last decision, we can thank WBD’s chief, David Zaslav, a man who personifies a generation of entertainment executives who don’t particularly seem to like movies or television, judging by how quickly they will shelve or delete the products of their studios, if it saves a few bucks.
Under Zaslav, Max has removed several of its original movies, reportedly to access tax write-downs, as the studio reportedly faced debts of $3bn. And he has pioneered the dark art of shelving films instead of releasing them, a brave new world of Hollywood chicanery. This was the case with Batgirl, a movie that had already entered post-production when it was cancelled, to take advantage of a “purchase accounting” manoeuvre. Similarly, WBD opted to shelve Coyote vs Acme, a completed film that had performed well with test audiences, in order to claim a $30m tax write-off. There are fears that once such a project is shelved indefinitely, the studio may eventually destroy it.
This not only deprives audiences of the chance to evaluate the film, but prevents the cast and crew from having their work seen, which is how creative workers obtain new jobs. And what is the point of a film studio that quashes movies instead of releasing them? Are Hollywood studios engines for creativity, or merely hedge funds with their own associated theme parks?
As extraordinary as it is for a film studio to deliberately block or destroy its own movies, it’s not entirely unprecedented. In 1933, Charlie Chaplin gathered five witnesses and burned the negatives of a silent film he had produced years earlier, A Woman of the Sea, as a tax write-off. That film is now lost.
During the shift to talkies, countless silent films were destroyed to clear vault space at major studios. It’s common knowledge among cinephiles that more than 90% of American films made before 1929 are estimated to be lost for ever. That includes notable works by film-makers such as Tod Browning and Frank Capra.
These films weren’t simply discarded. Often, they were deliberately destroyed as a result of the prevailing studio attitudes. As the film historian Ed Lorusso told me in 2020, studios failed to grasp the historical value of their own output: “You do this little 20-minute film, you’d show it, you’d make your money, and on to the next one. It wasn’t seen as art that needed to be preserved.”
Sounds familiar, no? We like to think media preservation is more guaranteed today, that the internet makes lost media an impossibility, but consider how many blogs, alt-weekly papers or niche news sites have withered into digital dust since the early 2000s.
Consider also how much cultural history was lost when Myspace inadvertently wiped all of the music uploaded to its website between 2003 and 2015. The Internet Archive is a godsend when it comes to digital preservation, but that organisation is under siege.
And when it comes to film and television, digital archiving practices are less reliable than you may realise. Last spring, the Hollywood Reporter warned that many digital files could wind up corrupted and unusable, a crisis most likely to affect the works of indie film-makers operating with limited resources. “You have an entire era of cinema that’s in severe danger of being lost,” the screenwriter Larry Karaszewski told the publication.
That quote is from 2024, not the 1930s. We may be at the precipice of a new age of lost media today. The widespread disregard for media preservation mirrors the shortsightedness and neglect of Hollywood studios nearly a century ago. Now, as then, there’s a brazen disregard for the history that is being swept aside.
Certainly, much of what is on streaming platforms today isn’t great cinema or television. But even the worst silent films from the 1920s or earlier held valuable historical significance. Their inaccessibility today is a warning of what can be lost when Hollywood prioritises short-term profit over long-term stewardship.
Zach Schonfeld is a freelance journalist and critic based in New York
