Just over a year into his first term, President Bill Clinton fulfilled his promise to return to MTV if young voters sent him to the White House. The 1994 town hall-style program was intended to focus on violence in America, but it was a matter of personal preference that made headlines and put MTV News on the media map.
Boxer shorts or briefs?
“Mostly briefings,” Mr. Clinton replied to a room full of giggles.
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 shutting down the news service.
The end of MTV’s news operation is part of a 25 percent reduction in Paramount’s workforce, Chris McCarthy, president and chief executive of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, said in an email shared with staff. with The New York Times.
MTV News and its cadre of presenters and video journalists were the ones to tell young people about the suicide of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and the murders of the Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur. They put viewers on the presidential campaign trail and came face-to-face with world leaders like Yasir Arafat, taking them to college dorms in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They also embraced the messy celebrity chaos of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as when Courtney Love interrupted an interview with Madonna. They always put music first.
Through it all, MTV News has never strayed from its core mission of centering the conversation around young people.
“There were no comparisons, it was one,” says SuChin Pak, a former MTV News correspondent. “We were the kids pushing in. There just wasn’t anything for 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 disruptor preparing for bankruptcy, and in the handheld camcorder reporting style that some CNN journalists have embraced.
MTV managed to entice a young audience that could call the band’s entire catalog Flock of Seagulls, but was also curious about current events, he said.
The Music Television network debuted in 1981 as a “fuse that ignited the cable revolution,” Mr. Thompson said. Six years later, MTV News hit the air with the deep, confident 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 announcement of Cobain’s death in 1994 that interrupted mainstream programming, making Mr. Loder “the poet laureate of Generation X,” Mr. Thompson said.
“It was live TV at its best, I think, for a terrible event,” Mr. Loder, who now reviews films for Reason magazine, said in an interview.
MTV News tried to differentiate itself from other cable news operations in a number of ways, Mr. Loder said.
For starters, the anchors and correspondents didn’t wear suits. They also weren’t “self-righteous” and tried “not to speak condescendingly to the public,” he said. That became especially important as rap and hip-hop seeped into every fiber of American culture.
“We didn’t jump on rap as a threat to the republic at all; we handled that stuff pretty evenly,” said Mr. Loder. MTV then started adding more hip-hop to its music programs “and suddenly there’s a whole new audience.”
Sway Calloway was brought into the MTV News fold to “take the conversation to the next level” around hip-hop and pop culture, and to do it with credibility.
“MTV News took the news very seriously,” he said. “We all wanted to make sure we stayed with integrity in what we did.”
Mr. Calloway, who now hosts a morning radio show on SiriusXM, said he knew respect for hip-hop culture had reached a new level while sitting in the White House Blue Room with President Barack Obama.
“When Biggie said, ‘Did you ever think hip-hop would come this far?’ I never imagined that the culture would be aligned with the most powerful man in the free world, that we could have a discussion through the hip-hop culture that resonates globally,” said Mr. Calloway. “It’s because of MTV News.”
From the beginning, MTV News saw itself as a critical connector for young voters. Tabitha Soren, an MTV News correspondent in the 1990s, saw that firsthand on the campaign trail with MTV’s “Choose or Lose” campaign to vote, and in the White House.
“People very sincerely and genuinely wanted young people to be educated voters, not just knowingly and willingly to get someone to the polls,” she said. “I felt like we were trying to make sure they were aware.”
For Ms. Soren, who was 23 when she first appeared on air for MTV News in 1991, it was easier to connect with younger audiences because she was their age, she said. That meant asking Arafat about the role of young people in the Intifada and going to Bosnia to follow US troops, many of whom were the same age as MTV’s viewers.
“I was empathetic because I was their age,” said Ms. Soren, who is now a visual artist in the Bay Area. “My natural curiosity usually matched what the audience wanted to hear.”
That was especially true for Ms. Pak, who was born in South Korea and filmed a docuseries for MTV News about growing up in America with immigrant parents.
“It was a culture shift for me personally, but with an audience suddenly thinking, wait, are we going to talk about this version of what it means to be American that is never shown and never talked about, and do it in the most real way possible?” said Mrs. Pak, who had been with MTV for ten years now co-hosts a podcast. “Where else would you have seen that but MTV?”
Just as Mr. Loder and Ms. Soren became cultural touchstones for Generation X, Ms. Pak, Mr. Calloway and others fulfilled that role for millennials. They ran home after school to watch Total Request Live and watched video journalists reporting the day’s headlines every 10 minutes to the hour during the network’s afternoon blocks and between Britney Spears and Green Day videos.
“A lot of people got their news from us, and we understood that and knew it,” Ms Pak said. “For all of us it was, okay, what is the audience, what is our way of coming in here that feels true? You do that by sitting next to them instead of standing over them.”