Black Entertainment Television, more commonly known as BET, has removed all digital articles from its website in a push to prioritize video content, JS’s Phil Lewis reported Friday.
Multimedia reporting remains on the site and BET’s social channels. However, the move to erase the written content came without warning, leaving many writers with no trace of their work, Lewis reported.
“Years of news articles are now gone forever,” he wrote.
While BET was once known as the pinnacle of Black media, its decision to remove these digital articles adds to an already fragile state of journalism, especially the Black press, as the Trump administration continues to target press freedom and diversity, equity and inclusion.
Historically, the Black press has served as a way to tell Black stories outside traditional mainstream outlets, with nuance and context that might otherwise have been dismissed or gone unnoticed.
The Pew Research Center found in 2022 that only 6% of U.S. journalists are Black, despite the U.S. population being around 12% Black. But recently, Black reporters (and other reporters of color) have been purged from newsrooms in considerable numbers.
JS culture reporter Njera Perkins previously contributed articles to BET and confirmed that her work no longer appeared on the website.
“It’s disheartening to watch years of journalists’ reporting wiped from the internet so easily and without warning,” Perkins said. “As digital media grows increasingly unstable, the burden falls more and more on writers like me to preserve and protect our work from being erased completely.”
“What’s even more troubling, though, is the precedent this sets, allowing more publications to continue a cycle of dismantling digital media and, in the process, erasing valuable resources documenting Black culture and history,” Perkins added.
The news of BET erasing its digital articles comes a day after BET announced the return of the iconic Soul Train Awards this November after a three-year hiatus. In late August, BET also announced a new BET Digital Community Reporting initiative which plans to invest in multimedia journalists across the U.S. to “deliver original, on-the-ground reporting centered on Black culture, community and the issues that matter most.”
The press release announcing the initiative said it would be “video-first.”
Paramount, BET’s parent company, has confronted numerous controversies lately.
Paramount made headlines Thursday when an aerial banner referring to Paramount CEO David Ellison as President Donald Trump’s “bitch” circled the office.
(The two are friends. Ellison hosted a dinner party earlier this year to honor Trump and the First Amendment; the controversial editor-in-chief of Paramount’s CBS News, Bari Weiss, and other CBS News figureheads also attended.)
Vivien Killilea via Getty Images
The deletion of BET’s news articles is the latest in a string of questionable editorial choices within Paramount.
Paramount bowed down to Trump in his lawsuit over the editing of a CBS News “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. They settled in July 2025 for $16 million, a move that critics said was a blow to press freedom.
Weiss sparked backlash earlier this year when she pulled an episode of “60 Minutes” about El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison. Critics said it was “political.”
Moreover, the National Association of Black Journalists condemned CBS News with its “Thumbs Down Award” last month.
“It was very discouraging this year to see the elimination of their race and culture unit,” NABJ President Errin Haines told Capital B News. “What does that mean in terms of CBS’ standard and reputation for having editorial independence and being able to pursue stories without interference? When news organizations are eliminating the people and the infrastructure needed to cover Black communities, when they are weakening editorial independence, that really hurts the American public’s right to know. You’re losing representation, but you’re also losing accountability.”
There is also a stalled $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. California and 11 other states are suing over antitrust concerns.
JS reached out to BET for comment but did not immediately hear back.