Archival Producer Rochelle Widdowson Sounds Alarm About Potential Impact Of Paramount-WBD Merger: “It’s Heartbreaking” – Bentonville Film Festival

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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.” Related Stories Festivals Need Snow?

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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.” Watch on Deadline Archival Producers Alliance 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.” Getty 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