Ten Critical Views on Vice

A reading list distilled from 550 works consulted.

• NY PRESS (Internet Archive) Why Corporate Media Is Sniffing the Butt Of the Magazine World Interview with the Vice founders before they learned how to control the narrative. This article haunted the company until the newspaper went out of business and the website went offline.

We had this organized crime dude…we learned from him is, Don’t get lost in contracts. If someone wants to fuck with you, they’ll fuck with you. If someone wants to sue you, they’ll sue you. Even if they have no point and they’re just angry. So the real way to talk is with fists…threatening people, going to their homes and just talking face-to-face. When we found out the dotcom deal was over, we had to go to our investor’s house in Nantucket, just to say to his face, “What the fuck is going on?” — Gavin McInnes (2002)

• WIRED The Snarky Vice Squad Is Ready to Be Taken Seriously. Seriously. The nerds at Wired do their homework on Shane Smith’s too-good-to-be-true stories.

…[Shane Smith] never raises his voice or his eyebrows, never sits forward in his chair. He has the unflappable confidence of a natural huckster.

“We started doing Vice and we got into fashion and music and lifestyle and all that crap,” he says, running a hand through his slicked-back rust-colored hair. “Suddenly, you’re at a Chanel party and you’re with some model, with coke running down your nostrils, and you kind of get lost in the vortex. But as we expanded internationally, we started to see a lot more of what was happening in the world. I started to get really pissed off about politics and economic disparity and the environment. I said, There’s all this shit going on, and we aren’t doing anything about it — although we have the ability to do so.’”

Warning: This is exactly the kind of narrative — from decadent cynicism to postmillennial earnestness — that journalists look for when they write profiles, and as such, it’s easy to be suspicious of Smith’s tale. After all, Vice was built on lies… (2007)

• SIMON & SHUSTER How to Piss in Public / The Death of Cool Gavin McInnes’ sordid biography has three chapters dedicated to Vice Media. The rest of the book is the account of comedic genius who’s internal rule is to never chicken out. Seriously, don’t read the non-Vice chapters unless you want to ruin your brain. Valuable insights into the current CEO of Vice Media “Bullshitter Shane” Smith.

Shane’s work ethic was inspiring too and his marketing talents were peerless. He’d call me at a payphone late at night and say, ‘We’re going to be rich,’ into the receiver again and again like a financial pervert with OCD. (2012)

• DAILY CALLER Vice Founder Famous for Truth-telling has a History of Lies. Chuck C. Johnson (aka Digital Darth Vader) has a knack for finding skeletons in people’s closet and raising a little hell in the process. Politically conservative, autistic with “high IQ and low empathy” disregards just about every rule of journalism except reporting truth. Ruthless in that pursuit; Chuck has made enough enemies on twitter to be get banned.

“It’s easy to see why Shane loves North Korea,” said a former employee. “He’s a cult leader who has built a Potemkin village where everything is smoke and mirrors.”

Smith’s integrity issues have extended to his personal life, as well.

He told an artist ex-girlfriend at her gallery opening that he was dying of a mystery illness and maintained the story for over a year.

“He would repeatedly tell her that any level of stress could kill him,” says a former VICE employee. “He kept using the phrase ‘doctor’s order’ to excuse whatever he was doing, like taking phone calls, or spending time with her would kill him. In reality, he was messing around.” (2013)

Later in an interview with Ryan Holiday of Observer Chuck said: “Shane Smith of Vice is a serial con artist who lied about being a wartime correspondent. The notion that his company is worth a billion plus dollars is laughable.”

• HOLLYWOOD REPORTER Vice Media: Why Hollywood Is Drinking the Kool-Aid Who understands Hollywood accounting better than Hollywood Reporter? Michael Wolff wrote the 2008 biography on Rupert Murdoch. The political cartoon paired with the article compares Shane Smith to Jim Jones (the cult leader responsible for the mass-murder suicide of 909 inhabitants).

[Shane] has lured backers from A&E to Fox by claiming magical access to young men. But his real trick might be marketing to a harder-to-reach audience: middle-aged media execs… (2014)

• CANADALAND Vice: an oral history. Jesse Brown’s podcast is an underground hit in Canada. This is a must-listen. Vice’s history told by the people who were there from the beginning. “Deceit has been a big part of their story from the very beginning… There were no concerns about lying to get the money — right.” (2014) The follow up podcast, VICE (2015) makes clear Vice’s “problematic relationship with the truth” and inability to be self-critical.
• BAFFLER The Vertically Integrated Rape Joke Anne Elizabeth Moore begins with a fact-check and ends in a strong critique.

“Lie becomes joke becomes stance: the evolution of form is mirrored by readers’ decreasing attention spans…the content engenders a lack of critical engagement among its consumer base; it also sidesteps the core practices of journalism.” (2014)

• REUTERS The timeless appeal of Vice Media Opinion columnist Jack Shafer makes it clear there is nothing new about Vice’s style of reporting. “The kings of capitalism keep rewarding the imps at Vice…” (2014)

“Like the flash press, Vice defines itself oppositionally to mainstream culture, burying its nose into stories that “classier” outlets would reject as too unsettling. For example, as if lifting a reel from Mondo Cane, Vice online ran a piece Tuesday about a Chinese dog-meat festival, complete with photos of a dead-and-slaughter hound and links to a similar piece from last year (“I Ate a Dog in Hanoi“).”

• BBC Shane Smith’s Radio 4 Profile Does a pretty good job making sense of Shane’s formative years. (2014)
• JOHNNY KNOXVILLE Shane Smith’s Private Roast at Center for Communication “Shane’s the only Canadian Rob Ford can call a slob,” and “Shane is to journalism what Jared from Subway is to Save the Children.” (2015)

And then there is Hamilton Nolan of Gawker…