The article says it was released online and if you were in Canada you could watch it. Also it doesn't say it here but another news source said the week prior it was advertised through commercials, ads, and online that it would be airing on so and so date and time.

Once I saw who stopped it, I kept thinking back to John Oliver's episode on her a few months ago and thought wow that didnt take long.

Sounds like an "international distributor" aired the episode, so it was already public, at least in whatever country it aired in. The only risk they took is perhaps getting their "international distribution" contract cancelled.

If it aired publicly, and nobody involved in the distribution is involved in the "archiving", there may be very little that can be done about it, short of sending the USS Trump to carpetbomb their country.

Valid point, but maybe a little less unique than it seems, at least if you look at the original Barbra Streisand situation. The photo of her house was originally so obscure and hidden that realistically essentially nobody had ever seen it, until she sued the photographer to have it removed. While it was technically "publicly available" before that it was in such an obscure dataset of coastal erosion examples that it had only been downloaded 6 times, which in terms of being "public on the internet", effectively rounds down to zero.

I believe the archivists are data hoarders aka pirates.

And so they're outside the USA.

It will be more than how many people will see it by being just a torrent.

If it's on peertube, you can just send a link to people and it'll stream right on the browser (granted it has enough peers which I'm pretty sure it will).

Nah, nah, someone does.

...surely. Someone does, anybody?

Advertising and ratings are toxic metrics to bind journalism to.

The proper way to proceed is to build systems and infrastructure that replace these vacuous incentives.