The Cult of Vice

http://www.cjr.org/analysis/the_cult_of_vice.php

by samclemens • 11 years ago

65 59 11 years ago

cjr.org

litmus4• 11 years ago

the interview with the hell-banned founder (Gavin McInnes):

http://canadalandshow.com/podcasts/vice-oral-history

heydenberk3• 11 years ago

Just an FYI, before you listen to what he spews: McInnes is a white nationalist, homophobe, transphobe and misogynist. This mediamatters post summarizes some of the outrageous things he's said or done: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/06/05/meet-the-hipster-rac...

You can understand why Vice would want to erase this dude from their history. I don't think they should be allowed to shrug it off, but I'm also glad that they try.

cholantesh4• 11 years ago

I remain unconvinced that he's not simply a troll playing a very long con. When I read him as such, I have found him very enjoyable, but as of late, overexposure is really causing the joke to wear thin.

Torgo• 11 years ago

Vice arrived at its current incarnation by a circuitous route. It emerged in 1994 as the Voice of Montreal, a countercultural magazine funded by Canadian welfare money

So, Gavin McInnes' fame, wealth and notoriety is all due to Canada's public funding of the arts!

benihana• 11 years ago

This is a textbook example of an ad hominem attack. You're not arguing any points he's made on their validity; you're trying to invalidate things he "spews" because you think his character isn't sufficient.

Intellectual laziness. Do you think that someone who says inciting things can't say insightful things simply because they stir up the pot? Or do you only think he's not insightful because he says things you personally don't like?

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

litmus4• 11 years ago

I don't think he's a homophobe. In order to call him that you'd have to cast a very wide net. As for the anti-feminism [1] or misogyny, some of the same points he makes in more provocative tones are made by the like of Caitlyn Flanagan in the pages of The Atlantic.[2]

The article you link to seems kind of overkill at times. It links to his articles for evidence of racial slurs where it seems pretty obvious he's doing it intentionally since in one he mentions an uproar where Sarah Silverman called Chinese people Chinks ("People look really stupid shaking their fists at a clown"), however self-serving that may be.

But I think it can be said that his arguments are often repeat ad-nauseam versions of this scene from Rescue Me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJpziU7wSs

[1] very NSFW http://old.noob.us/humor/what-if-women-were-as-horny-as-men-...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/boys-wil...

eertami2• 11 years ago

How some people are so incapable of recognizing satire is beyond me.

copsarebastards3• 11 years ago

But editorial standards change when your aim is not to be an entertainment company, but a trusted source of news.

This amazes me: what makes them think that they aren't a trusted source of news for their audience?

With expansion comes a sense of responsibility,” he told me recently in one of Vice’s glass-walled conference rooms. “As time goes on I don’t think that being silly, being stupid, is cool anymore. When you look at the planet, at the state that it’s in, it demands attention. It demands scrutiny. And it demands a certain level of seriousness.”

Could it be that it's exactly the lack of seriousness of Vice's reporting up to this point that has made people trust them? Reality isn't always serious, and when it is, sometimes the only way to deal with it is to laugh at it, or to admit that it's strange.

In short, this looks like yet another company getting big and then changing everything that made them successful. It's not necessarily going to hurt their bottom line, but it's an example of why companies getting big is bad for consumers.

fennecfoxen• 11 years ago

This amazes me: what makes them think that they aren't a trusted source of news for their audience?

High-quality, prestigious yellow journalism. Remember the Maine!

copsarebastards3• 11 years ago

"Yellow journalism" means it's sensationalized or exaggerated, but I think most of Vice's stuff wasn't; they simply reported on sensational topics, and people assumed they were exaggerated because the topics are seemingly larger-than-life to an audience unfamiliar with them.

Of course, they weren't perfect, but when they did sensationalize or exaggerate, I think it was a bit more harmless than most news sources. Everyone is doing it to sell ad space, but Vice tended to sensationalize stories that were weird rather than stories that created fear or outrage--their sensationalism was less politicized.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm talking about Vice a while back, not Vice now. The changes mentioned in the article are already apparent in some of what Vice is doing these days.

freewizard• 11 years ago

it's an example of why companies getting big is bad for consumers. it's also in general what drives us building new things/companies.

litmus4• 11 years ago

My thoughts exactly. The writing has gotten stale without adding real substance--with a few exceptions obviously. But in general they've sacrificed form without adding meaningful content. They had an issue on Somalia a while back where most of the pieces could have appeared on any mainstream magazine that gets extra brownie points for the symbolic act of dedicating an issue on an under-reported topic. It's like playboy, but instead of porn they have Do's and Don'ts and video game reviews, and the writing is shittier. I think I've enjoyed some of the fiction pieces they added in the past few years more than the journalism frankly.

You can be silly and be authentic most of the time, and then once in a while when you say something about the truth, people will listen.

I love that line in Ghostbusters: ""Let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area."[1] It stupid and silly, hell its Ghostbusters, but the scene is an authentic template of many idiotic and funny explanations you witness in random casual conversation, as well as being pretty much a template for all latter day Bill Murray scenes.

McInnes' view on writing--"just write a letter to your brother but take out all the inside jokes"--has been almost completely abandoned in the magazine.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzaQjS1JstY

EDIT: typo

joshuapants5• 11 years ago

This amazes me: what makes them think that they aren't a trusted source of news for their audience?

They probably know that their audience trusts them as a source of news, but they also know that the wider perception of them is not as a trusted source.

copsarebastards3• 11 years ago

So they're going to dump their audience to compete for the audience that every other news source is competing for?

pakled_engineer• 11 years ago

Vice news docs in the beginning I liked because they gave uncensored translations of locals which sometimes were hilarious even when the topic was supposed to be serious, and there wasn't dubbed translations muting the local language out like every other media does. Sadly now they've taken to playing menacing background music during stories like when they interviewed some drug addict in Afghanistan who claimed to be ex Taliban and did everything including slowing down his laugh so it sounded as evil as possible. It's bordering on propagandatainment lately.

There was also a questionable story by Vice about the Nigerian military fighting militants recently and the supposedly embedded reporter made zero mention that the entire crew in the attacking helicopters they filmed in were not Nigerian. Hey why do the gunners and pilots have white arms? Are they mercenaries? British pilots? South African? Who knows Vice never bothered to tell us.

DanBC• 11 years ago

White people can be African. There are about 5m to 6m white Africans. There's probably not many white Nigerians - probably less than 10k. But white does not mean not African.

ambirex3• 11 years ago

Perhaps this is now old, but everytime Vice is brought up all I can think of is this piece with David Carr from Page One (2011) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmkec_4Rfo

icpmacdo• 11 years ago

Here is a 2014 article from David Carr giving them a bit more credit

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/business/media/its-edge-in...

ambirex3• 11 years ago

Absolutely they are evolving as a news org, and for the better. It is just hard to shake off the view I had of them.

thieving_magpie• 11 years ago

It has one of the best insults I've ever heard, hence its popularity. "Just cuz you put on a fucking safari helmet and look at some poop..."

But to dismiss what they've done with this video being posted every time does everyone a disservice. But yeah, good for a laugh. Not to be overly high and mighty about it but I'd really prefer to do my funny pics/videos on reddit.

ambirex3• 11 years ago

I really wasn't trying to dismiss what the have been evolving into, rather to voice my own problems seeing past the Vice that was presented in Page One.

serve_yay2• 11 years ago

Where Vice started and where it is now is certainly a sign of the times, I'll say that.

Apocryphon• 11 years ago

'Vice has described its salaries as “competitive with comparable emerging media companies,” but many employees seem to be here for the work and the culture, not the money.

“There’s a sense that you’re lucky to be there,” said one former employee. “What you don’t get paid for in cash is made up in the cool factor, and maybe getting into their parties.”

“It’s like a cult,” said another ex-employee.'

When an employer makes it clear that you're lucky to work for them, and when you're getting paid in cool factor instead of cash, you probably are working for a corporate cult.

selimthegrim• 11 years ago

This sounds vaguely like when I interviewed for Dark Horse Comics' IT team, without the parties.

seiji• 11 years ago

working for a corporate cult.

Much like the modern (wrong) meme of "every company should try to be an abusive monopoly," every company should also try to be a cult unto themselves. You want your employees willing to die for the chance at helping you become a billionaire while they get much much much less. They should wake up every morning wondering how they can win your approval, even if it requires sacrificing their own wellbeing.

A good SV-viewpoint sociopathic writeup of why your company should be a cult is (pdf) http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/storage/essay_pdfs/cult.p...

fezz• 11 years ago

This cool factor tradeoff works for a little while early on but once it ceases to be the inherently cool, it turns into large and manufactured cool. Simultaneously, that's when it also becomes a toxic work environment.

NeutronBoy• 11 years ago

When an employer makes it clear that you're lucky to work for them, and when you're getting paid in cool factor instead of cash, you probably are working for a corporate cult.

Or a startup

santaclaus• 11 years ago

Or a game studio.

stefs• 11 years ago

i occasionally read local vice articles (not u.s. - they obviously employ writers in lots of countries) and most of them are unbearable trash.

then, suddenly, a gem appears. the vice munchies take on weightlifter morghan kings diet is one of the better introduction to weightlifting in general.

(in case anyone's interested: http://munchies.vice.com/videos/fuel-the-diet-of-champion-we... )

pessimizer• 11 years ago

Isn't Vice's show on HBO just Unreported World with no women, anorexic men, and sarcasm?

The last season even repeated the exact same story with the same correspondent and the same title for the Egyptian Tomb Raiders segment ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KmPQEtnqqI ).

tezka• 11 years ago

Relevant older, harsher piece

http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/the-vertically-integrated-r...

hitekker• 11 years ago

I'm sure the author in your link had some good points, but they may have been overshadowed by all of the article's vitriol.

The Cult of Vice

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