Earlier this spring, film stars and industry heavyweights made a splash, successfully drawing attention to the vast economic and creative harms the looming Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger would wreak on the industry. But underneath these increasingly well-covered concerns lurks one of the merger’s most dangerous consequences that the public has yet to fully realize: the silent consolidation of our nation’s memory.
Since the beginning of broadcast television, American families have come to understand the world through TV news. And after they air, these stories of our history remain in the care of the networks. News archives are crucial for scholarship, historical storytelling and the preservation of America’s collective past.
The proposed merger threatens to place CNN and CBS News, two of the most significant news libraries in America, under a single owner. The future preservation and accessibility of these archives are at risk if they are allowed to be merged under one private entity, as the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger would entail.
Archives are not just passive repositories of aired broadcasts. They are also stewards of extensive raw footage, original reporting and historical material that is often unavailable elsewhere. As archival producers with collective decades of experience, we are deeply concerned that this merger would lead to decreased access to invaluable material we rely on to tell compelling, accurate stories about our communities, our country and the world.
Television news often serves as the first draft of history, covering events essential to public understanding and civic participation. Historical documentary storytelling relies on these first drafts to synthesize deeper narratives, provide social commentary and bring new perspectives to old stories.
But access to these primary source materials usually requires an approval process at the sole discretion of their owner, and can factor in the content or perspective of a project. The result is that corporate owners can determine who is allowed access to, and use of, this material — gatekeeping who can tell these American stories and how.
History has shown us that corporate consolidation can further reduce — and politicize — access.
In 2019, the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC News, instituted a policy to allow only Disney-owned outlets to license any of their aired stories, reporters or anchors. So if, for example, an independent documentary about Sept. 11 had wanted to use a clip of Peter Jennings on that day, this policy would have prevented them from doing so, unless the film were to air on a channel like Disney+, ABC or Hulu. While the policy was ultimately reversed, dozens of documentaries were denied access to national stories in the meantime.
As other archives have consolidated under fewer owners, higher prices are being demanded for the use of footage. Some media conglomerates, such as Tegna, charge as much as tens of thousands of dollars per minute for usage by outside companies, making certain stories financially unfeasible, especially by independent media makers who can offer critical, less commercially oriented perspectives.
Professionals across the field have run into other barriers where access has been denied or restricted for explicitly political or editorial reasons, underscoring the real risk of censorship and historical distortion. Again, this is not without precedent — during wartime, one Archival Producers Alliance member was told by a news archive that they could not license historical footage of a previous war because it “showed American soldiers in a bad light,” despite having licensed the same exact footage for a previous project.
This time around, the writing is already on the wall. Earlier this spring, CNN Collection, the content licensing arm of CNN Worldwide, laid off its licensing team. Eliminating staff with institutional knowledge of the collection and long-term relationships with scholars and mediamakers is an alarming testament to how these archives could be treated moving forward.
Shifts in archival retention and access policy don’t make headlines. But they should. Quietly, swaths of American broadcast history are becoming accessible only to those who already own them. With these shifts, the future of stories being told — that powerful institutions would prefer remain untold — dims. The harms that this consolidation could cause would take decades to remedy. If audiovisual material is destroyed or lost under the new management, the damage is irreversible.
All of this is why our organization, Archival Producers Alliance, has endorsed the Future Film Coalition’s Block the Merger Campaign, which is working to make lawmakers and the public aware of the adverse impacts of the merger. We have contributed statements on the issue to a California Legislature spotlight hearing, as well as to members of the Senate Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee. Both events elevated stories of individuals across the media industry — including the documentary filmmakers who rely on access to these materials.
Archives are a unique and undervalued part of our journalistic and civic infrastructure. They are not simply corporate assets. They are the evidentiary backbone of our shared history. If we allow them to be swallowed by a few media giants, we aren’t just losing footage — we are surrendering the historic record of American life to private interests with no obligation to preserve it or, just as importantly, share it.
Once it’s gone, there is no recovery, and no second draft.
About the Archival Producers Alliance:
The Archival Producers Alliance’s mission is to promote the value, use, protection and preservation of authentic archival materials; and to elevate and amplify the role of archival producers within nonfiction media. At the center of our work are two inseparable principles: memory and trust. We believe memory is safeguarded through the protection of authentic historical media; and that trust in media is required for the public to believe that what they see or hear is real and verifiable.
Founded in 2023, the APA represents over 600 archival producers — and counting — from across the U.S. and internationally. We are using our unique collective knowledge to influence policy and affect change within the industry through three primary initiatives:
- Creating standards for, and assessing impacts of generative AI in nonfiction media and audiovisual archives
- Developing methods for local TV news preservation
- Offering professional development, advocacy and industry outreach for archival producers
