Vice News Joins the Propaganda Pyre
Toss Another Once-Hot Brand On Corporate Media's Bonfire Of Vanities
“My impression has been that [Vice] swung too much in the direction of inward-looking things like identity issues, transgender etc. To create the world which it wants to see, rather than the one which actually exists. All that does is insult the intelligence of most of its readership. And consequently, I just flicked by.” — Katharine Eyre
“The young get old and revolutions end up eating their own.” — Aris Roussinos, “My Part in Vice’s Downfall”
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The implosion of Woke media rocketed from fission to thermonuclear levels yesterday, with the sudden and swift shutdown of VICE.com, as parent company Vice Media Group announced it would lay off hundreds, stop publishing on its website, and move to sell its other remaining infotainment brands like Refinery29. Good luck with that.
VICE magazine was an exciting new voice in news and opinion back in the mid-1990s, when it was launched by three guys in Canada as an edgy, youth/young adult-targeting news and leisure magazine. As Film Editor at a regional tabloid in the ATL at the time, I read it with a mix of resentment and begrudging respect; impressed by it sometimes, pissed off by it others. But at least it was snarky, unpredictable, daring and anti-Establishment.
Of course rebel success brought ambition, investment and expansion, with every big media conglomerate looking to get its hooks in the increasingly influential platform. With repeated infusions of cash over the next two decades, VICE magazine expanded into online content, then various web series, news divisions (Vice News), a film production studio, record label and other sundry media empire wannabe maneuvers.
In 2001, right before 9/11, Vice Media transplanted its HQ from Montreal to New York City, where it began rubbing elbows with the corporate media elite and entering the mainstream. Its first big corporate media partnership came with Paramount’s MTV in 2006, quickly followed by the launch of a slew of publishing verticals, loosely or not-so-loosely tied to the Vice brand: Vice News, Motherboard (tech), Noisey (music) and Munchies (food), as well as The Creators Project, an arts/technology site resulting from an Intel partnership.
During this period, Vice Media also launched an advertising agency called Virtue Worldwide, which was announced during my final years on the NYC ad scene, when I working not far from Vice HQ in Brooklyn for the red hot digital agency HUGE, which, like every single ad agency I’ve ever worked for, was peaking creatively and reputation-wise during my tenure there, ahem. The formation of Virtue Worldwide scared the shit out of most people in the ad biz, but not the too-cool-for-you young hip execs at HUGE; one of them, I can’t recall who, scoffed and said they’d never make it, they were expanding past their skill set, don’t sweat it. He was right.
This was also around the same time that Vice Media’s expansion started splintering its brain trust. Co-founder Gavin McInnes proved too conservative for Vice Media’s shifting brand identity to cool corporatism and left Vice Media due to "creative differences,” before moving on to founding the Proud Boys.
Once McInnes was pushed out, the real corporate media opened its spigots. First the Murdoch empire invested a ton of money and got a 5% stake. Then Warner Brothers put them on HBO with a news and documentary series that won a couple Emmys. Growing ever more in influence over young minds, Disney and Hearst Publishing both blasted new investments, bringing them roughly 15% and 10% ownership respectively. Then Vice got its own cable channel (remember that?), Viceland, part of the A&E Networks brand branches.
Vice peaked in 2017-18, when it got a half-billion investment from private equity and announced it was moving into scripted content and movie-making. As a result, Vice Media was valued at an eye-popping $5.7 billion, while Disney’s stake increased to about a quarter when it acquired the Murdoch Empire’s portion after the rat kingdom completed its gobbling up of 21st Century Fox.
“Après ça, le déluge.” Not long after the multi-billion dollar valuation, the two remaining leaders of Vice Media both got #MeToo’d (and deservedly so, or so it seems), replaced by a crazy liberal white woman, Nancy Dubuc, who promptly ran the company into the ground.
One of Ms. Dubuc’s first moves was to consolidate many of Vice Media’s web channels back into one central platform and turn them into feature sections under the parent identity. Motherboard, Munchies, Noisey, etc., were now all Vice News sections, not separate brands, expected to adhere to one lockstep editorial vision and narrative messaging.
Less than 48 hours after the consolidation was announced, George Soros disclosed he’d made a $200 million investment in Vice Media, and the fate of the company was sealed. Doom beckoned.
With corporate media’s claws, Soros V.C. money and a crazy white liberal lady’s oversight, Vice Media’s conquest was complete. It quickly degenerated into just another lame Woke predictable virtue-signaling navel-gazing Trump-obsessed propaganda rag, as, in the words of above-cited Aris Roussinos:
“Vice’s original YouTube fanbase, which skewed young male and Right politically, vocally resented the radically progressive orientation of much of the company’s new output. At the same time every publication from the New York Times to Teen Vogue began speaking in the same voice, Vice no longer sounded distinct. The punk magazine-turned-megabrand had gone corporate, and now sounded like any other American corporation, only more so. Vice, which had won acclaim for dispassionately showing viewers how the world really is, now looked excessively concerned with its own virtue.”
The first layoffs came a year after the vertical consolidation and unified top-down narrative messaging was implemented, May 2020. Despite the new white liberal lady oversight — nearly all the new executive hires were women, pushing out the rebel male mentality that founded and built the brand — the corporation was hit with numerous accusations of a toxic work environment as it became increasingly female-centric.
These allegations metastasized to the point where they scuttled Vice Media’s plans to go public in late 2021, forcing it to instead pursue additional investment money. With more and more corporate cash, the content became even more abrasively Woke and crazed and dishonest. Web traffic collapsed, advertising dried up. By January of last year, Vice began a desperate attempt to sell itself to some massive media conglomerate.
It failed. Exactly one year ago tomorrow, after destroying the company, crazy liberal white lady Nancy Dubuc abandoned her sinking ship. Then, in May 2023, Vice Media declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Vice Media’s meteoric rise and reality/gravity-imposed fall makes for a remarkable tale, similar to so many others, and I’m sure it will make half of a great book some day because we’ll never get the full story. The hottest English language digital news and infotainment brands of the early 21st Century — Vice, Buzzfeed, Mashable, the holy trinity of hipster news platforms, Rule of Three — are all now pretty much dead, zombies at best.
In their place has arisen what appears to be a much better and healthier and arguably less easy to control paradigm: the indie news entity built around a single individual iconoclastic voice asking a lot of questions. Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Patrick Bet-David, Jimmy Dore, even the ex-Vice News reporter Tim Pool, and so on.
Where do things go from here? I have no earthly, other than assure you that the corporate media’s Bonfire of Vanities will only continue to burn, probably out of control. The dominos have started falling. Of those thousands and thousands of so-called “journalists” who’ve been laid off in the past six months, the vast majority of them are close-minded brainwashed activists who should be doing something else, or doing nothing at all. There are way too many “journalists” who’ve turned what should be an honorable profession into a vice. “Presstitutes,” as someone more clever than me deemed them. Maybe the pendulum is swinging the other way, but don’t be so sure it’s not the one Edgar Allan Poe wrote about.
Or maybe this is just another apocalyptic Sign O’ The Times, a different heavy metal riff off the media consolidation that we saw everywhere right before 9/11. Beats me. It’s not like the bad guys are getting any less blatant.
Another great piece. How the hell do you do it?
It would make a great half-book or Fire Festival style documentary. I also agree that the collapse has only begun. But not everywhere… not Dailywire for example or Substack, which is curious. It seems like whenever the vision is lost, everything goes down with it. It happens in every industry… retail, restaurants, Big Tech. The guy with the vision gets rich and tired and the people who made him rich want their imprimatur or their amazingly stupid Harvard Business School management principles to prevail. It’s actually all quite hilarious, like in a Joker kinda way.
A trivial aside, but did you know David T. Lindsey, who wrote movie reviews for years in the ATL, for a rag called Stomp & Stammer? I dislike movies, but enjoyed his takes as well as rants at the Book Nook.