It’s not your imagination. Google is getting worse, and it’s not just because they’re infecting its own product with consumer-averse A.I. slop and pages of worthless ads. It’s also a product of private equity, seeing the writing on the wall and desperately wanting to erase it. Since MTV News shuttered last year, it was by the divine mercy of their corporate owners that some two decades of culture reporting would at least be accessible on the MTV News website.
So anyone looking to research how MTV covered the post-9/11 pop culture landscape sans social media manner is S.O.L. We all are. Basically, until society accepts that journalism isn’t much of a moneymaker and stops trying to milk it for cheap clicks, we’re going to keep seeing elements of our recent history pulled down and destroyed. Soon, all that will remain are remembrances on the Way Back Machine and what’s available when we add “site:reddit.com” to search queries.