Paramount-WBD Merger Puts CBS, CNN Archives at Risk
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Rochelle Widdowson, archival producer on the documentary "Ghost in the Machine," warned at the Bentonville Film Festival that the proposed Paramount-WBD merger would consolidate control of the CBS News and CNN archives under one private entity, calling the prospect "heartbreaking" and warning that material could be taken offline or destroyed.
- Skydance Media, through its acquisition of Paramount, already controls the CBS News archive; a successful Paramount takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery would also give it control of the CNN archive, one of the most significant resources in the news and documentary space.
- The Archival Producers Alliance, founded in 2023 with over 650 members, published a June op-ed in Poynter warning of what its founders called "the silent consolidation of our nation's memory" if the merger proceeds.
- Alliance founders Stephanie Jenkins, Rachel Antell, and Jennifer Petrucelli cited a 2019 Disney policy restricting ABC News clip licensing to Disney-owned outlets, which they said temporarily blocked independent documentaries from using material like Peter Jennings' Sept. 11 coverage as a precedent for what consolidation enables.
- Some archives are already pulling collections offline to prevent AI companies from scraping them for training data, making it harder for archival producers to source material, per Widdowson's Bentonville remarks.
- The Alliance's prior Los Angeles Times op-ed flagged OpenAI's Sora text-to-video platform, which previewed a fabricated "Historical footage of California during the Gold Rush" clip, as evidence that synthetic media could erode public trust in documentary truth.
- "Ghost in the Machine," directed by Valerie Veatch and acquired by PBS's "Independent Lens," drew on roughly 900 archival pieces to trace AI's ideological roots to the eugenics movement of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Why it matters: Documentary filmmakers and the public face decreased access to decades of irreplaceable news footage if the proposed merger places the CBS and CNN archives under one private entity, the 650-member Archival Producers Alliance warns, pointing to Disney's 2019 ABC News policy that temporarily blocked independent films from licensing national news clips.
