A documentary producer speaking at an Arkansas film festival has raised public concerns about what the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger could mean for some of the most significant news archives in American history.
Rochelle Widdowson, an archival producer on the documentary Ghost in the Machine, spoke at a Q&A following a screening of the film at the Bentonville Film Festival. Her concerns center on a specific consequence of the merger that has received little public attention: the consolidation of both the CBS News archive and the CNN archive under a single private entity.
"It's heartbreaking," Widdowson said, according to Deadline. "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."
Skydance Media, through its acquisition of Paramount, already controls the CBS News archive. If the Paramount-WBD merger is completed, it would also acquire control of CNN's archive, which is considered one of the most important in the news and documentary industry. Widdowson called those archives "moments of our history that you just can't replace."
Widdowson is an Australian native based in New York and a member of the Archival Producers Alliance, a group founded in 2023 that now counts more than 650 members. In June, three of the Alliance's founders, Stephanie Jenkins, Rachel Antell, and Jennifer Petrucelli, published an opinion piece in the nonprofit Poynter Institute outlining what they described as a major public risk.
"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 wrote.
The founders argued that archives are not simply storage for finished 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 pointed to a recent precedent as a warning. In 2019, the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC News, instituted a policy restricting licensing of its aired stories, reporters, and anchors to Disney-owned outlets only. The Alliance founders described this as an example of how corporate consolidation can reduce and politicize access to historical material.
Ghost in the Machine, directed by Valerie Veatch, draws on archives from CBS, Pond5, PBS, the BBC, and other institutions.
