Proposed Paramount-WBD Merger Assailed By Archival Producers

The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, if it goes through, would not only have a major impact on the future of the media business, but on our collective past.

Skydance Media, through its acquisition of Paramount, already controls the CBS News archive. If Paramount succeeds in taking over WBD, it will also assume control of the CNN archive, one of the most important in the news and documentary space. That’s cause for alarm among some who work constantly with the historical resources of CNN and CBS News.

“It’s heartbreaking,” says Rochelle Widdowson, archival producer on the documentary Ghost in the Machine. “I think it’s really, really sad that there are a handful of people who are controlling these and I think it’s on all of us to kind of come together as a community and decide how we want to engage with this and this industry and the political side of things. Because if everyone’s just sitting to the side and saying, ‘Okay, we can’t go back,’ we can’t just magically make the archives reappear if they’re taken offline, if they’re destroyed. So, it’s a big issue right now.”

Widdowson spoke at a Q&A following a screening of Ghost in the Machine at the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas. The film directed by Valerie Veatch draws on archives of CBS, Pond5, PBS, BBC and other institutions. Regarding archives like those of CNN and CBS News, Widdowson said, “These are moments of our history that you just can’t replace.”

Widdowson, an Australian native now based in New York, is part of the Archival Producers Alliance, a group founded in 2023 that boasts over 650 members. In June, Alliance founders Stephanie Jenkins, Rachel Antell, and Jennifer Petrucelli wrote an opinion piece for the nonprofit Poynter Institute elucidating what the authors called “one of the merger’s most dangerous consequences that the public has yet to fully realize: the silent consolidation of our nation’s memory.”

Jenkins, Antell, and Petrucelli argued, “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.”

They continued, “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.”

Their piece noted, “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 [anchor] 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.”

Archives and AI

The Archival Producers Alliance has separately taken on another issue of huge concern to makers of documentaries and others who work with archives: the rise and already pervasive use of AI.

Last year, Jenkins, Antell, and Petrucelli wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that stated, “In the spring of 2023, we began to see synthetic images and audio used in the historical documentaries we were working on. With no standards in place for transparency, we fear this commingling of real and unreal could compromise the nonfiction genre and the indispensable role it plays in our shared history.”

They cited an example: “In February 2024, OpenAI previewed its new text-to-video platform, Sora, with a clip called ‘Historical footage of California during the Gold Rush.’ The video was convincing: A flowing stream filled with the promise of riches. A blue sky and rolling hills. A thriving town. Men on horseback. It looked like a western where the good guy wins and rides off into the sunset. It looked authentic, but it was fake.”

Widdowson, the Ghost in the Machine archival producer, articulated her concerns about the potential of AI to erode our collective sense of historical experience.

“It’s really worrying,” she said, “because if we don’t have a way to verify our history, it’s really hard to see where we’re going and it’s hard to learn from our past if we don’t actually know what has happened.”

At the Bentonville Q&A, she noted some archives are taking their collections off the internet to escape the reach of AI companies. “[That] makes it really hard for people like me to go through them, but if you have artificial intelligence and you have these tech companies going into their archives and sweeping through them and training data from them, that’s really worrying.”

Ghost in the Machine, which as Deadline reported has been acquired by the PBS series Independent Lens, traces the roots of AI to eugenics, the movement born in the 19^th century that posited the human race could be enhanced through selective breeding. The movement reached its apogee under the Nazis and while “eugenics” as a term has been relegated to the past, and its purported science has been effectively debunked, the film argues that eugenics’ ethos of perfectibility and super-intelligence is manifest in what might be called the ideology of AI.

Veatch’s film draws on archival materials from the 19^th century, through the 20^th and into our current era.

“I can’t remember even how long this archive cue sheet was, but it was definitely one of the longest I’ve ever worked on,” Widdowson commented. “I feel like there was like 900 at least pieces of different archive.”