Vice and Mollification

People seem to like to talk about media these days in a way they were never really interested in doing so before. And, truly: Normal people, who don’t work in media, but who are now just totally inundated by it in ways they’ve never been before. So when you’re outside of New York and the subject invariably turns to VICE, and what You, Person Who Works In Media In New York, thinks, my pocket response is usually something like: They got big, fast, to nobody’s surprise; it wasn’t hard to see it coming, I like a lot of the stuff they do, I don’t like other stuff, just judge a media company a piece at a time, and so on.

But I was recently asked to explain what “problem” I could possibly have with What VICE Is Doing For Young People and News, and this is an exhausting conversation to have half-drunk at a wedding, but this time, I took the bait, because I could start with pointing to Paul Farhi’s Washington Post filing from the day before on how Vice’s Company Brass dispassionately and regularly shuts down news stories that run against The Company’s financial interests.

[Here, I should note, for my friends at VICE: I’ve got no doubt most of you who work in editorial there have any of this coming as news to any of you, and — I should add — I also have no doubt most of you recognize and hate the reality of this. Some of you don’t really care, because that stuff generally doesn’t affect the work you do, which you’ve never had come under question. That’s fine, too. Overall, again, I think most of the people there do or at least aspire to do good work unimpeded by untoward interests.]

My issue is with Shane’s stance on this matter, and the people more than willing to trot out (or write off) his argument that advertisers aren’t really telling VICE what to do. Or as he put it in 2014:

“Does North Face tell us where to go?” he said. “Do they pick our hosts? Do they fucking pick the story? No.”

Well, of course not. But also, that’s a canny and bullshit piece of misdirection.

For one thing, look no further than that canceled mortgage crisis story preceding a show sponsored by Bank of America:

This [Vice] employee described an extensive reporting project undertaken by Vice journalists about Bank of America’s mortgage-lending practices. When a senior editor found out the project had been underway for nearly three months, he expressed alarm to those involved. The investigation was soon aborted. Some weeks later, Vice News announced the creation of a personal finance show, “The Business of Life,” aimed at its millennial audience. The sponsor was Bank of America.

Now, did that show trot out talking points that plainly run parallel to Bank of America’s interests? Is the show about how terrible financial regulation is? Is the show itself evil? Of course not. And it’s hosted by a journalist who is, without pause, someone I fully trust to understand ethics in media.

But: There’s a vacuum created when you write off the value of a report demonstrating the various ways in which large banks (like: Bank of America) continue to take advantage of their customers! A way for Bank of America to align themselves with a “cool” brand with the word “News” in its name is not, to be gentle, the best thing to fill that vacuum.

And that’s how the show is bad, and runs counter to the aims of an actual news organization, and speaks to a key understanding of the canniness that’s a brilliant offensive in capitalism: Mollification. Not the spreading of disinformation, or propaganda, but filling the void of valuable understandings with information that isn’t substantive or whole. The “zone” is more vast than ever, and there’s an argument to be made that it’s easier to flood (or wash away true grit of actual reporting) more than it’s ever been before.

And an organization that aspires to be in the business of news, and trusted by young people with the business of news, doesn’t habitually compromise on the larger truths of the world. And these truths may seem insignificant or plainly obvious, as in, not worth fussing over — at they very least, they’ll be written off by VICE brass as collateral details, things that need to go by the wayside in service of a greater mission, telling a more important story, getting inside ISIS, or the KKK, to see what they’re “really” about. More from Farhi:

In one shot, for example, a bystander wears a T-shirt featuring the Nike logo; in another, a self-identified Klansman wears a cap with a Budweiser logo and drinks a Bud Lite. The appearance of the logos set off a brief flurry among the documentary’s producers, who scrambled to obscure them from viewers after the documentary had already been posted. The series was briefly taken down and the logos of the two companies — both of which have been Vice sponsors — were digitally blurred, as was the logo on a Coke can. The series then reappeared, with the images altered. News and documentary filmmakers traditionally do not remove corporate logos that appear incidentally in footage. Doing so changes the facts of a scene or image, said Tom Bettag, the former longtime executive producer of ABC’s “Nightline.”

That’s one way to put it. Another is: What kind of story is being told about the Ku Klux Klan by vaporizing the visual evidence of their similarities to everyone else, and that similarity being — what else — the fact that they spent money on Nike? To separate the Ku Klux Klan from this fact is to dismiss the nuances of reality, and nuance is the enemy of the sensationalist, of hucksterism — nuance is the grey, pedestrian shit that life’s largely made of, and it makes for an unsexy story. In the Klan’s case, that’s most definitely the banality of evil, and the realization that this vast, billion-dollar commercial entity is what bonds the Ku Klux Klan and everyone looking at these all-too-human monsters, these unapologetic, diminutive racists.

It goes without saying, but: Of course Nike doesn’t want anyone to see that. It’s not in their interest to let anybody highlight or dignify that fact, let alone condemn it. And it’s in VICE’s best interest to not have that conversation to begin with, to not instill even a moment of doubt in a media buyer’s mind that there aren’t gonna be any problems when push comes to shove with a client.

Let’s put it another way: Nearly all of the heads of the Republican party can speak plainly about the terribleness of abiding the KKK as voters but VICE won’t show them wearing Nike.

Anyway, the next time Shane tries to tell anyone that the mission of VICE isn’t under compromise because of advertisers, he might be right sometimes, but that mission only involves a portion of the truth, the parts that don’t hurt the multinational conglomerates underwriting them, and anything but the whole truth is, well, exactly that. And, when I’ve got one, that’s my problem with VICE: They’ve done better than anyone else at convincing people who don’t work in media, people in Hollywood, people across America making their choices about what media brands to trust — they’ve convincing those people that they’re somehow immune to or above doing this kind of thing, when, well, they’re not. That’s all.