The extremely mixed bag that is Vice is reportedly headed for bankruptcy, per unnamed inside sources quoted by the Newspaper of Record™.
Via The New York Times:
“Vice, the brash digital-media disrupter that charmed giants like Disney and Fox into investing before a stunning crash-landing, is preparing to file for bankruptcy, according to two people with knowledge of its operations.
The filing could come in the coming weeks, according to three people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to discuss the potential bankruptcy on the record.”
This is an astounding fall from grace for a company that was once valued at nearly $6 billion and was seemingly fostered into the mainstream media by the likes of HBO and Disney:
A bankruptcy filing would be a bleak coda to the tumultuous story of Vice, a new-media interloper that sought to supplant the media establishment before persuading it to invest hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2017, after a funding round from the private-equity firm TPG, Vice was worth $5.7 billion. But today, by most accounts, it’s worth a tiny fraction of that.
Although the term is overused, in my estimation, this appears to be a cautionary, tragic tale of “go woke, go broke.”
Over the years, Vice has done some excellent gonzo-style reporting in the best tradition of Hunter S. Thompson, like this instant classic regarding dueling warlords in Liberia that opens with Shane Smith, Vice founder, interviewing “Ex-General Butt Naked” while wading through a swamp “Somewhere in Liberia.”
It only gets weirder from there.
There was really no other game in town in terms of this type of reporting with anywhere near the reach that Vice had.
The outlet was at its best when it produced these independent, on-the-ground, mostly uncensored documentaries about goings-on in the furthest outposts of the world.
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Unfortunately, beginning sometime around 2015 when it began flirting with Disney and HBO, Vice’s coverage took on an obvious and distasteful Social Justice™ bent that made it largely indistinguishable from a rival like Buzzfeed. It began vomiting out uber-cringe thinkpieces, like this one that attempts to deride dairy as “unsettling” and vaguely racist.
At its lowest point, Vice hired this ambiguously-gendered minority reporter for a non-stop hatefest against the racist West in a tired recounting of the evils of slavery, as if the UK is the only country to ever sanction the practice, followed by a predictable call for reparations.
It turns out, lecturing your audience non-stop about how racist they are only works to attract a very fringe minority of the Social Justice™ left — and they already have the entire corporate media as their playground. That niche of the market was already oversaturated.
In short, Vice took on all manner of “sh*tlibbery” as its institutional ethos. In the process, it lost the magic. Back before YouTube took away the like/dislike bar, Vice routinely got ratioed by angry fans who didn’t appreciate its recent transformation. The comments sections were, as the kids say, “lit.”
How could Vice have expected to survive and thrive in a competitive media environment when it essentially became an MSNBC knock-off?
“People know what’s true. They can smell it,” Tucker Carlson once opined — one of the more succinctly accurate observations he’s ever made. When savvy viewers can see that an outlet like Vice has strayed from what originally made it great — even if they can’t describe the process or don’t understand the forces behind the scenes that catalyzed that change — they sour.
Vice is reaping what it has sown.
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