By the time Vice Magazine began its expansion in the early aughts, I was already in my thirties, so its output mostly passed me by. I did purchase Vice Dos and Don'ts: 10 Years of VICE Magazine's Street Fashion Critiques for the library system where I was working; my impression was that their content consisted primarily of images of drunken hipsters. My next encounter with the media company was driving by its office building in Venice, CA, which was located next to Erowhon, the most expensive grocery store in Los Angeles, and across the street from a large homeless encampment. This was circa 2021-22.
During those in-between years, while I wasn’t paying attention, Vice delved into serious news reporting on conflicts around the world. Of this reporting, Aris Roussinos writes:
…the “bang-bang” was merely a vehicle with which to smuggle in serious analytical reportage of poorly-understood conflicts and revolutions. Vice’s central insight was that if you framed the story right, and shot it well enough, you could persuade teens and early twentysomethings to watch in-depth explorations of Syrian rebel justice systems, or the intricacies of South Sudan’s civil war. Middle-aged execs from traditional networks had always claimed young people didn’t care about granular detail, or distant wars in Africa: but this (apart from stories about drugs) was always by far the most popular content, judging from YouTube views and comments. The audience never demands dumbing-down: viewers want nuance, shades of grey, and moral ambiguity. They want to see the world as it is, not as it ought to be.
Image: A U.S. Marine, right, assigned to Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis Response, guides U.S. citizens down a flight line in Juba, South Sudan, during an evacuation of personnel from the U.S 140103-M-HF911-006.jpg/ Wikimedia Commons
Although Rouissinos writes that “the fundamental challenge of all news broadcasting — how to make the most difficult and expensive content on earth pay for itself — had still not been solved,” he pins the demise of Vice on “the political polarisation of American life after 2016” which caused viewers to “drift away from whatever interest they showed in confusing wars in far-off places for an obsession with their own internal conflict.” He writes that the “resultant polarizing of the online world” left Vice’s original YouTube fanbase, which he describes as skewing “young male and often hard Right,” resentful of “the radically progressive orientation of much of the company’s new output.” He continues:
At the same time every publication from the New York Times to Teen Vogue began speaking in the same voice, Vice no longer sounded distinct. The punk magazine-turned-megabrand had gone corporate, and now sounded like any other American corporation, only more so. Vice, which had won acclaim for dispassionately showing viewers how the world really is, now looked excessively concerned with its own virtue.
Whether outside funding initially came into Vice to save the company or to remove or absorb competition, it does appear to have changed the direction of the reporting, ultimately leading to the loss of its audience and resultant bankruptcy. It is also possible that as Vice became more successful, it attracted staff from elite institutions, who may have been guilty of a type of groupthink that doesn't resonate with the wider public.
Although I worry that the polarization of the media is creating a public that is unable to consider issues in a nuanced way, it appears that audiences do still crave “nuance, shades of grey, and moral ambiguity.”
Top image: Hipster Professional (Unsplash).jpg/ Wikimedia Commons
By the way, why do you believe the media has such power to alter consumers' cognition?
>>> Although I worry that the polarization of the media is creating a public that is unable to consider issues in a nuanced way, it appears that audiences do still crave “nuance, shades of grey, and moral ambiguity.” <<<
Big fan of Gioia, will read. My answer to your question, though, is yes, from what I have seen amongst my acquaintances. Obviously given the popularity of alternative sources of media now, and by that I mostly mean podcasts and Substack, lots of people are immune.
I guess I would wonder whether their media consumption is actually changing much in your acquaintances, rather than basically just feeding into a pre-existing receptivity for stuff they actively seek out.
I'd have to say I read a great deal more news and in depth analysis from a wider variety of writers now than, say, four years ago because of the explosion of sources outside mainstream. The variance is also huge and I am pretty selective; but nuance, shades of gray and depth are what attract me to many sources I've found. The mainstream chorus has nothing to offer me that I can't pick up, basically by osmosis.
I could have added a list of media entities to this piece that have followed the same path (and subsequent downward trajectory) of Teen Vogue and Vice... sites like Salon, Jezebel, The Onion, The AV Club, etc.
Here's an explanation:
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/judgment-day-has-arrived-for-the
By the way, why do you believe the media has such power to alter consumers' cognition?
>>> Although I worry that the polarization of the media is creating a public that is unable to consider issues in a nuanced way, it appears that audiences do still crave “nuance, shades of grey, and moral ambiguity.” <<<
Big fan of Gioia, will read. My answer to your question, though, is yes, from what I have seen amongst my acquaintances. Obviously given the popularity of alternative sources of media now, and by that I mostly mean podcasts and Substack, lots of people are immune.
I guess I would wonder whether their media consumption is actually changing much in your acquaintances, rather than basically just feeding into a pre-existing receptivity for stuff they actively seek out.
I'd have to say I read a great deal more news and in depth analysis from a wider variety of writers now than, say, four years ago because of the explosion of sources outside mainstream. The variance is also huge and I am pretty selective; but nuance, shades of gray and depth are what attract me to many sources I've found. The mainstream chorus has nothing to offer me that I can't pick up, basically by osmosis.
I could have added a list of media entities to this piece that have followed the same path (and subsequent downward trajectory) of Teen Vogue and Vice... sites like Salon, Jezebel, The Onion, The AV Club, etc.