In the industry, this is known as a "hatchet job"

June 20, 2016 11:36 AM

Daniel Voshart (Twitter) has an axe to grind with VICE, everyone's favorite new-media-gonzo-journalism-lifestyle-possibly-advertising group. His rather adversarial Not VICE series discusses the other side of the company's narrative, from the purported thin line between content and advertising to the murky past of figurehead Shane Smith and the loose journalistic guidelines in their documentaries.

If this is a bit too off-balance for you, check out Wired's 2007 profile of VICE and The Onion's pitch perfect parody, Edge (my favorite: Kisha Nai: Inside The Japanese Subculture Of Ignoring American Reporters Even If They're Rad As Hell).
posted by redct (27 comments total)

oooooh delicious!
posted by Dressed to Kill at 11:45 AM on June 20, 2016

No need to worry about the vices of Vice; a civic-minded tech billionaire will sue them out of existence any day now...
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:49 AM on June 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

As long as they don't hand someone a slam-dunk civil suit against them, they'll be fine.

So, yeah, coin-flip. Hashtag "edgy."
posted by Dark Messiah at 11:54 AM on June 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

They'll never make the same mistakes Gawker did. Vice'll make (and already has made) all-new, unique, mistakes. Yay!
posted by destructive cactus at 11:59 AM on June 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

Thanks for sharing this. As someone who often gets sketchy vibes from Vice "journalism"—and their history as an org—I'm very interested in diving into Voshart's research.
posted by defenestration at 11:59 AM on June 20, 2016

Step 1: Former member of Giant Bomb moves to questionable media company.
Step 2: Questionable Media Company faces Debilitating Lawsuit
Step 3: ????
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:00 PM on June 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

David Carr's VICE takedown from Page One.

Damn I miss David Carr.
posted by pxe2000 at 12:04 PM on June 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

VICE taught me that Canadians, contrary to stereotype, can be just as big of assholes as my fellow countrymen, so for that at least I give it props.
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:08 PM on June 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

Related: Dronez on Documentary Now
posted by mcstayinskool at 12:15 PM on June 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

Is the writing on Medium really consistently horrible, or am I just picking the wrong links to click? And is their formatting actually attractive to some people or is the that "web brut" design aesthetic I've been reading about? I'm sympathetic to this guy's point of view but slogging my way through his prose and the web pages that contain it was really dispiriting.
posted by layceepee at 12:32 PM on June 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

Medium is just a content platform, kind of like Wordpress. There's no real editorial aspect to the majority of Medium links.
posted by griphus at 12:35 PM on June 20, 2016 [8 favorites]

Yeah. I'm pretty disgusted by Medium's "default place to put prose on the internet now" status, but the writing on Medium is consistently horrible in the Sturgeon's Law sense, I think, not in the USA Today sense.
posted by brennen at 12:48 PM on June 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

I do kind of like their cable channel, Viceland.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:15 PM on June 20, 2016

Yeah, the writing isn't great. And Voshart has also linked/cited Chuck C. Johnson in one of the posts, which raises red flags for sure. But I'm glad people are challenging the Vice narrative. Beyond the validity of their journalism, it really seems like they take advantage of their employees. Not cool.
posted by defenestration at 1:36 PM on June 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

He makes lots of valid points, but also he's a bit too eager to score off Vice on stuff that doesn't really matter (e.g. saying "I thought Vice was non-political" in reference to a passing mention of the general state of US politics. This makes him seem petty, which is unfortunate when there are numerous non-petty problems highlighted by his work. Basically I think the project requires more work and time than he's actually able to dedicate to it, so he's doing these rather rushed "an analysis of 30 seconds of voiceover" pieces, rather than the strenuous and extensive fact checking that is actually needed. It's a good start but it comes off a little half-baked at this point.
posted by howfar at 1:39 PM on June 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

For Shane to have known a dozen dead gang members in Canada’s capital, he would have had to associate with every gang member that died over the course several years

Not that I really believe Smith's story, but I really don't think this is the 'gotcha' the author thinks it is. I don't think the Ottawa Police had a very good handle on what may or may not have been happening with youth gangs until a decade later, when they were scrambling to crack down on the Ace Crew. And that's if Shane's friends were even really considered a "gang" and not just a bunch of friends that liked to do drugs and get in trouble. Like, is analyzing crime statistics for gang deaths going to turn up every suburban teenager that ODed on something or got in a fatal car accident? Smith's probably exaggerating but still.

Anyways I kinda thought it was well known that the founders of Vice were total fuckups. Vice was the trashiest, raggiest trashy rag out there and that was the whole appeal of it. Kinda still is, too, although they've gotten much ballsier in where their correspondents will go to, and it continues to have its moments. I suppose I'm coming from a place of having seen where they came from and watched them grow though, so perhaps they have an air of legitimacy to someone seeing it for the first time. Scary thought, that.
posted by Hoopo at 2:15 PM on June 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

I always kind of felt Vice was the American Apparel of magazines.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:18 PM on June 20, 2016 [16 favorites]

Vice is sophistry that tries to spin its product as something better than journalism, but commits the same errors, only more so. There is no science in how they present information. It is theatre, but they know how to grab attention with their shaky reportage.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 3:09 PM on June 20, 2016

This is so great. Vice needs skewering pretty badly. The macho gonzo thing even annoyed me with the film "Fear and Loathing" when they were with an underage girl; just the whole middle-class slumming was gross to me even though my friends thought it was the coolest thing ever. I get what Thompson was trying to do, but he seemed to have spawned a grotesque genre inadvertantly.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 3:36 PM on June 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

And that "Edge" thing was great. "Spiky as fuck" and MACHETE are my new catchphrases.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 3:38 PM on June 20, 2016

I've often noticed that VICE seems to only focus on the scary and fucked up things that happen far from the US/Canada. They examine extreme poverty and corruption, but never the causes. It's always ooh look how scary and fucked up these places outside the USA are.
posted by cell divide at 3:54 PM on June 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've been approaching Vice like those stories your good old friends tell when they've had too many drinks, and you've heard them a hundred times over 20 years and all the details keep getting more outrageous, and you know it's mostly bullshit now but you don't care all that much because when it's told well it's still a good laugh. I guess it's probably best if it's looked at like the journalistic equivalent of those Drunk History videos.
posted by Hoopo at 4:30 PM on June 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

Have you seen the "State of Surveillance" episode from VICE? It's really good (mostly being an Ed Snowden interview) and they've made the full episode available for free.
posted by jjwiseman at 5:46 PM on June 20, 2016

This is honestly one of the dumber things I've seen on the internet. If your "hatchet job" against Vice consists of linking to conservative sites like The Daily Caller and criticizing them for disabling comments (which should be considered a conceivable good!), then you are trying way too hard.

I like Vice fine, they aren't perfect but they put out great stuff like Gaycation and Vice Guide to Film and the occasional awesome longform interview.
posted by windbox at 5:56 PM on June 20, 2016 [6 favorites]

It's an odd piece of reporting that cites Chuck C. Johnson *and* The Baffler. Or more concerningly that pulls critical comments about Shane Smith from his own roast. So I do think this guy comes off just a bit of a crank. On the other hand some of the criticism of their treatment of employees and their integrity in journalism and in business is fair game and that's the important part really.
posted by atoxyl at 6:31 PM on June 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

From what I understand, Vice does not treat its fixers in these far flung places very well.
posted by k8t at 1:52 AM on June 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

From what I understand, Vice does not treat its fixers in these far flung places very well.


That seems ... unwise.
posted by louche mustachio at 11:16 AM on June 21, 2016