Hello Folks.
As we inch closer to the 44th anniversary of MTV’s launch back in 1981 and look back to remember the Music TV Channel’s influence on our society, especially as children growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, I want to remember a part of MTV that wasn’t a part of its initial launch. In fact, it would take 6 years for MTV to make it a recurring part of their programming, but something I think is very important and contributed greatly to the popularity of the channel until things changed in the 2000s.
Now, if you are 10-20 years younger than I am in my early 40s, then it may be hard to imagine a world where there are no social media apps, no cellphones, hell- not really even the world wide web as the typical American family would come to know it later in the 90s. Today, news breaks so quickly and spreads like wildfire (sometimes a bit too fast) and as we navigate the endless scrolling of apps like Facebook, X, Instagram, etc, we often find out huge news stories when they happen, and not much longer the media outlets and news apps will send out push notifications to our devices notifying us of this news event that people on social media have already reported. That wasn’t the case before the internet. With the rise of cable TV in the early 80s, channels like MTV were created, giving musicians and artists a creative outlet to showcase their music videos and for viewers to discover new music they may not have been able to hear on the radio. But another trend in Cable TV had happened one year prior to the launch of MTV. It was a man named Ted Turner who created the Cable News Network- we know it now as CNN – that really started the business of the 24 Hour News Network. And over the course of the next two decades, we would get other networks like Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, and a variety of other industry specific news channels (ESPN News, CNBC, Bloomberg, etc).
When Live Aid happened in 1985, MTV’s VJs went down to cover the event, and in 1986, MTV launched a program called “The Week In Rock”, hosted by Rolling Stone writer Kurt Loder, who became the network’s first official news correspondent. It’s a little unclear how long that particular show lasted, and as the 90s came along, it’s hard to know how often the program would air, but what started out as “The Week in Rock” slowly evolved to what folks refer to generically as MTV News. This would be apparent during commercial breaks of regular MTV programming, as a familiar sound and graphic would appear before Loder would start by saying “Hi, I’m Kurt Loder with an MTV News Brief” and then typically go into a 1-2 minute story related to something in the world of music, before the normally scheduled show would come back from commercial break.
Honestly, looking back, this may have seemed like a small and subtle part of MTV, but I think it was very influential on its effect on keeping us Gen X-ers and Millennials somewhat briefed on what was going on in the world. Especially in a pre-internet society. And because viewers of MTV were pretty much going to the channel looking for the music, the way they interwove the news during the commercials was I think pretty genius. How many of us were going to sit down and watch a 30 minute show dedicated to all of the music news of the day or week? We were young, and at the time our focus was not finding news. So delivering this to us in the method they did was a smart move on their part I think. These news bits culminated into two larger news-related and noteworthy events of the early 90s. The first, was the coverage of the 1992 election with George H.W. Bush looking to get re-elected, and newcomer Bill Clinton from Arkansas entering his name into the race. Clinton was looking to appeal to younger voters, and MTV helped in that effort by covering the 1992 Presidential Election with their “Rock the Vote” efforts and also a program called “Choose or Lose” in 1992 – in which Governor Clinton engaged young adults and answered questions that were important to young voters of the time. In the years following, MTV would stay very closely tied to the presidential races of 1996 and 2000. Infamously, MTV would be known as the channel that asked President Clinton, who was seeking re-election, if he wore boxers or briefs.
The other big news event, that is often associated with Kurt Loder and MTV, is when it was discovered that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain had died from a self-inflicted gunshot. This was how most of us found out about this tragic news, and when he went live on the air on April 8th,1994, it was a huge moment in pop culture and the music industry. Loder delivered that tragic news with the proper amount of melancholy and sorrow in a way that many of Cobain’s fans needed to hear it. Years later, MTV would cover the deaths of Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and Aaliyah in similar breaking news fashion.
As the years went on, Loder would not be the only correspondent reporting news during commercial breaks. Hosts like Alison Stewart, Tabitha Soren, John Norris, Chris Connelly, Sway Calloway, Suchin Pak, and others would be featured during “MTV News Briefs”. But, like Loder, they kept their reporting short and brief, which appealed to the shorter attention spans of the youth viewing demographic. Other relevant things that MTV covered were events like the Gulf War, the OJ Simpson trial, the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Columbine School Shooting, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and less serious topics like announcing tour dates for bands like Guns N Roses, reporting on controversies surrounding Madonna and her music, and like I mentioned the Presidential Elections of 1996 and 2000. When MTV shifted their focus in the early 2000’s, and became more about “reality based” tv programming, that’s when to me MTV News became less important, but that also coincides with the internet and world wide web becoming more popular, and younger folks were exploring websites and getting their news as opposed to getting it from their televisions.
To me, in a time before the internet became a part of our daily lives, but living in a culture that had already been evolving and changing from when our parents were younger, MTV News was just a small part of a greater influence that the entire network had on us growing up. The reporting style and content in which it told and delivered relevant pop culture news would soon shape the new and current way we all get our news these days- in quick blurbs, push notifications, relevant tweets of 160 characters or less, and a text-message laden society that pass and share information to family and friends.
These days, Kurt Loder, now 80 years old, still writes for various websites and also hosts a show on Sirius XM called True Stories. To me, he’ll always be that guy who reported various news tidbits during my MTV watching years. Maybe not as significant as perhaps a Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather would be to an older generation, but to a 80’s and 90’s kid, discovering music, grunge, hip hop, and everything else that MTV represented, he’s right up there!
