BET Deleted Its Entire News Archive and Nobody Sent a Press Release

BET quietly deleted its entire news archive. Years of Black reporting, gone — and it is the same playbook that erased MTV News.

I went to BET.com because I did not believe it.

I had seen the reports saying BET pulled every article off its site to focus on video, and my first reaction was that somebody had it wrong. Somebody always has it wrong. So I went and looked for myself, and I clicked through the whole site.

The articles are gone.

Not archived somewhere. Not moved to a new section. Gone. Our history, our news, our music and entertainment coverage. The old news pages now redirect to a homepage that is nothing but video tiles and YouTube links. The page's own code describes it as a “simplified” homepage. That is the word they used.

HuffPost deputy editor Phil Lewis was the one who surfaced it, and the AV Club picked it up on September 4, 2026. The reporting is blunt about what happened: years of news articles are now gone forever, and while some writers managed to save their own stories, others did not.

I want to sit in the confusion for a second, because I think a lot of us are there.

This is not the first time

In 2024, Paramount wiped MTVNews.com off the internet entirely, along with content from CMT, Comedy Central, TV Land and Paramount Network. Decades of music journalism, columns and features, deleted. The Internet Archive later assembled a searchable collection of 479,020 MTV News pages and 73,557 CMT pages, purely because a nonprofit decided somebody should. The man who founded and led MTV News' digital group from 1994 to 2007 called that rebuild incomplete.

So there is a playbook. BET just got run through it.

The difference is what was on the shelf. Losing sitcom clips is not the same as losing the record of how Black America covered its own elections, its own protests, its own artists, in its own words.

Let's be precise about who owns what

Black people run BET. Scott Mills is CEO of BET Media Group. Louis Carr is president of BET Networks. Those are real titles held by real Black executives with real teams.

They do not own it.

BET sits inside Paramount Skydance Corporation. On August 7, 2025, entities controlled by the Ellison family together with RedBird Capital bought National Amusements outright. The renamed holding company holds 100 percent of the only voting class of stock, and the Ellison family controls roughly 77.5 percent of that holding company. David Ellison is Chairman and CEO. His father Larry, the Oracle founder, holds about 35.5 percent of the family's voting interest and put up the bulk of the cash. Public shareholders hold Class B stock on Nasdaq. Dividends, yes. Votes, no.

So one family decides. Two people, really.

I need us to hear the correction inside my own argument. It is not accurate to say Black media is run by people who are not Black. Our people are in the chairs. They are not on the cap table. And a title without equity is a seat you can be removed from, which is why a decision like this one comes down from above the very people whose faces are on the brand.

They already told us no

This part gets left out of the conversation every time.

In 2023 Paramount put a majority stake in BET Media Group on the market. Tyler Perry bid around $2 billion, backed by Ariel Alternatives. Byron Allen bid, then came back in December of that year at $3.5 billion. Diddy was in the mix. In August 2023, Paramount ended the process, saying a sale would not result in any meaningful deleveraging of its balance sheet.

Perry later called the bidding process disrespectful and said he was not going to pay for something not worth anywhere near the value Paramount claimed. Allen wrote directly to Paramount's board accusing them of an egregious breach of fiduciary duty for pursuing an inside sale at a below market price.

Black capital showed up with billions on the table. The answer was no. Three years later the archive was deleted anyway.

Morgan DeBaun has been saying this out loud for years

Morgan DeBaun founded Blavity in 2014, in the months after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, because she was frustrated with how our story was being covered by people who were not us. She has been extremely clear about what running a Black media business actually costs.

On raising money, she has said plainly that she does not ever get the benefit of the doubt. She described investors demanding access to her Google Analytics because they did not believe organic growth was real without Facebook ad spend, and asked whether the same media company would be run through that same diligence if it were not Black.

On the industry itself, she noted that progressive media tends to pat itself on the back, because it only ever measures itself against non-progressive media.

She also flagged the quieter killer: keyword blocking. Advertisers block terms around race and protest for brand safety, which means the exact moments when Black media matters most are the moments its revenue gets cut off.

That is the machine. Underfunded going in, penalized for covering our own lives, and then sold to somebody who deletes the work.

Byron Allen bought HuffPost. So why stop there?

In May 2026, Byron Allen's family office acquired approximately 51 percent of BuzzFeed in a $120 million deal, making him chairman and CEO. That acquisition includes HuffPost. His stated vision is expanding into free-streaming video, audio and user-generated content.

Days after closing, he stood in front of BuzzFeed and HuffPost staff, emphasized editorial independence and the significance of Black ownership, and told the newsroom to say whatever the hell they want to say.

That is a Black man buying a major American news brand to transform it. That is exactly what we say we want.

And then there is EDITION

In July 2021, Roc Nation partnered with Modern Luxury Media to launch EDITION by Modern Luxury. The framing was strong. A multi-platform portal into luxury that celebrates talent from diverse communities. Print, digital, social, experiential. Isoul H. Harris, formerly editor-in-chief of UPTOWN, brought in to run it. Roc Nation CEO Desiree Perez said they could not think of a better partner to amplify the voices of a powerful community. Modern Luxury principal John Amato acknowledged outright that luxury titles have historically lacked diverse coverage and called it a proud moment. The debut collector's Art Issue launched at Art Week Miami that December with Issa Rae on the cover.

I have never understood this move.

Read the name again. EDITION by Modern Luxury. Not by Roc Nation. Jay-Z's company brought the culture, the talent, the access and the credibility to a media house it does not own, to launch a title inside somebody else's portfolio, under somebody else's masthead, on somebody else's servers.

I say this as someone who has worked in this industry and with these brands. It was a beautiful product. That is not the question. The question is what happens to it the day the parent company restructures, sells, or decides print is not core to the mission anymore. We just watched exactly that happen to BET.

You cannot protect what you do not own. It is the same sentence, over and over, in a different font.

So here is my question, and I mean it sincerely and not as a dig

Why has that never become a table?

Byron Allen. Tyler Perry. Oprah. Jay-Z. Pharrell. Robert Smith. David Steward. Beyonce. The long list of Black people in this country with acquisition-level capital is longer than it has ever been in history. Individually, several of them have already tried to buy the same asset and lost. Collectively, do we really have the power to create a conglomerate of black-owned media companies?

Ask Ebony and Jet how this ends

When Johnson Publishing collapsed, the photo archive of Ebony and Jet, more than four million prints and negatives documenting twentieth century Black life, was headed for private auction. Historians panicked, because privately auctioned means privately disappeared.

What saved it was not us. A consortium of the Ford Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the Smithsonian stepped in. In July 2022 they transferred ownership to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Getty Research Institute, with the Getty Trust committing $30 million to digitize it.

I am grateful it was saved. Genuinely. Those images of Dr. King, Malcolm, Maya Angelou, Shirley Chisholm and everyday Black folks are preserved because those institutions moved.

But read the sentence again. The most powerful Black-owned publisher in American history went under, and its record of us had to be rescued by outside foundations and a federal museum. We could not save it ourselves. We did not have a vehicle.

That is the pattern I am pointing at. Not villains. A pattern.

The part I cannot stop thinking about

If you understand how large language models work, you know they are trained on enormous amounts of text scraped from the open internet. You also know that when you ask an AI a question now, it often searches the live web to build the answer.

So what happens when a chunk of that data is deleted?

Future training crawls will not find what is not there. Live search cannot cite a URL that redirects to a video page. Every article on every other site that ever linked to BET's reporting now points to nothing. The chain breaks quietly and completely.

We are watching search engines get replaced by language models in real time. My mother googled. I google less every month. The generation behind me is going to ask a machine and take the answer.

So my question is this.

If our children stop searching and start asking, and the model answers from whatever sources are still standing, and a significant portion of our record has just been wiped off the internet, then whose version of Black history are they going to be handed?

Because it will not be ours. It will be somebody's write-up of us.

We are not just losing an archive. We are losing our seat at the table where the record of the next hundred years gets written.

Who is buying it back?