Drugged-up Stevie Nicks, feuds with Kurt Cobain: Inside MTV News’ glory days
nypost.comI Want My MTV,” “completely destroyed. “I mean broken glass tables, broken televisions, a full wet-bar with every glass broken,” the book reveals.Loder’s room was junked as well.Though a smiling Loder denied doing it — MTV kicked in with Nirvana’s tour manager to cover some $30,000 worth of damage — Finnerty has her doubts: “I have a hard time believing Krist would ruin his room and then ruin Kurt’s room, too.”But that was then.
More recently, MTV News, launched in 1984 at the then three-year-old music video channel, aimed the wrecking ball at itself.MTV News put out its last blast of pop-music updates this past week as parent company Viacom shut it down.
For an outlet that once reigned as the CNN of rock ‘n’ roll, it died quietly — as an Internet only operation, with a bare bones staff and a sense of irrelevancy.It did not start out like that, though.From the early 1980s into the early 2000s, MTV was everything for music obsessed kids.
And MTV News kept them abreast of Madonna’s latest provocations, Michael Jackson’s newest dance moves, and Axl Rose’s current insanities.Not coincidentally, according to Tim Sommer — a reporter with the burgeoning newsroom and author of “I Only Wanna be with You” — those three stars wielded power that blurred the lines between business and journalism. “Their presence was so big,” he said. “We’d have to kill stories that they wouldn’t like.”“MTV was not going to run a scandal story about a band unless the band wanted it,” Merle Ginsberg, another one of the news department’s young reporters, told The Post. “We were championing rock ‘n’ roll.”MTV News proved itself capable of mustering Water Cronkite-level seriousness for another Kurt Cobain moment: when the rock star shot himself in 1994..
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