As History Disappears, Radio Needs to Remember to Preserve Its Past

History is disappearing. That’s a literal statement, although I’m not suggesting that everything from the past won’t exist in the future. What’s disappearing is evidence, the recording of events of all kinds — from radio, to television and feature films, for posterity. Part of it is technological, part of it is commercial, and part of it is just that, as the song said, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

The latest example is cultural, with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment’s announcement that those DVDs produced in 2006-08 of Warner movies and cartoons are now unplayable due to manufacturing defects and that they’ll replace the discs if they’re available. That’s a big if. The rights to some of the movies may no longer be in Warner’s hands, and it’s also the case that Warner may not really care to re-release some titles because there’s insufficient demand for them, including some Looney Tunes collections which include cartoons that just aren’t seen anymore, anywhere, unless someone ripped them to YouTube. So much for physical media protecting you against streamers dumping content at will and making it unavailable through any means.

We assume that the internet has made everything available to everyone, but that’s just not the case. A lot of material has been lost because the rights holders don’t see a commercial market for it. You might think that news is not the same, that we’re chronicling our history more than ever. Maybe we are, through social media and “citizen journalism,” but none of that is guaranteed to be around in the future.

Take Disney, for example, which just shuttered what was left of 538 (the former FiveThirtyEight before someone decided spelling it out was too much to bear), the data vertical that bounced from Nate Silver to ESPN to The New York Times to ESPN to… oblivion, it seems, because the overlords at Disney decided not just to pull the plug and fire the staff but to also wipe any evidence of the site’s existence off the internet.  All those polls, all that analysis, gone for good. Oh, well.

News sites… well, there’s the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which rights holders have fought for years. Otherwise, we’re at the mercy of the site owners, and that’s trouble right there. Besides, which version of an edited and/or updated story gets saved?

What would we get if, say, The New York Times went back and redid Walter Duranty’s stories to edit out the glowing reviews of the Soviet Union, or The Washington Post redacted the names of some of the Watergate principals? They can, which doesn’t do much for trust. We do have Newspapers.com and its virtual version of newspaper archive microfiche; it’s expensive but worth it, because I’ve lost track of how many forgotten details of stories I found with a quick search of a small-town paper. But all of that can go away at the whim of ownership, and then what?

Oh, and radio. Yes, people collect scoped airchecks of old Top 40 radio, and “recorded transcriptions” of the Golden Age exist, but stations have never been in the business of recording and archiving everything they put out every day, and they aren’t going to start now with their private equity overlords (and creditors) watching every penny. Decades and decades worth of radio news, sports, entertainment, and even commercials are gone, unless in the hands of collectors.

I can’t even play you what the radio stations where I worked sounded like back then, because airchecks were taped over and lost to the ages. (Individual hosts may have kept tapes, but YOU try and get them in one place and archive them all.)

And if we’re looking at an unreliable, hit-or-miss archive of news coverage of important events like, oh, what’s going on in Washington and Palm Beach right now, what will history look like for your grandkids? Maybe it’ll be like the 1800s, where we can piece together from written accounts what was going on; maybe it’ll be like everything before Gutenberg, guesswork based on evidence from archaeology and science. Maybe someone will carbon-date Ryan Seacrest and extrapolate the history of his many jobs.

We don’t know what the future will bring, or if we have a future to worry about, but we thought we were videotaping and collecting everything in news and culture and it turns out we don’t know if we can see every Bugs Bunny cartoon.

These are interesting times on all fronts. Someday, people will look back on 2025 and ask what the hell happened and how, whether it’s political or movies and TV or what life was like back then. It’ll probably be a good idea to save everything so they know the truth. At the very least, they’ll get to make fun of our hairstyles and clothes.

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