So (and I'm guessing here because I really can't stand to click on a Vice link) that a lot of those PhDs are in bullshit fields like "national security studies" or similar?
In particular, their feature-length documentaries are consistently amazing, as is Vice on HBO. Shane Smith and Thomas Morton both have balls of titanium. They go places ordinary journalists would never go, figuratively and literally.
Give them a second chance.
That is exactly what compulsive liars/sociopaths like Shane Smith want: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/03/vice-founder-famous-for-tr...
The documentaries and reporting produced by Vice are entertaining, but their standards of reporting basically make them a hipster tabloid.
1) The Daily Caller isn't exactly a noted truth teller itself 2) The author of that particular piece, Charles Johnson, is well known for being utterly without scruples whatsoever. He's also one of the purveyors of the extremely offensive "cuckservative" meme that popped up recently (hint: its white supremacist) which leads to #3... 3) Gavin Mcinnes, one of the founders, left Vice under not particularly friendly circumstances and has since come out as a white nationalist and he and Chuck Johnson are pretty tight online. Just some food for thought here.
Also, to back up the parent, yes, Vice does run a great deal of clickbait, but they also run things noone else will. I've read younger authors who I discovered on more mainstream sites that have had pieces published at Vice.
https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/vice-media-kit-warning-...
http://gawker.com/working-at-vice-media-is-not-as-cool-as-it...
> Gavin Mcinnes, one of the founders, left Vice under not particularly friendly circumstances and has since come out as a white nationalist and he and Chuck Johnson are pretty tight online. Just some food for thought here.
You can tell a lot about a person from their cofounders. McInnes was at Vice from 1994 to 2007. Vice was built on shock journalism, McInnes never hid his racism and homophobia:
http://www.nypress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?avis=NP&date=20...
Please stop wasting our time.
I mean, for any billing issue, if you're contracting out a person with a non-accredited PhD then they do not have an accredited PhD and representing it that way is simply fraud; and from the side of customer/government asking for data on any "PhDs" including self-proclaimed, instead of accredited degrees would be simply ridiculous.
the analysis is pretty straightforward from there.
Top Secret America by Dana Priest (http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d...) is a somewhat interesting read on it. There are some politically angled results you can take from it but one of the most obvious non-political results is that the national security apparatus employs people that tend to be better paid, live in better areas and have all those benefits (better schools for their kids, less crime, etc..) They also seem to be disproportionately white men. If you squint your eyes just right, it looks an awful lot like a jobs program for white men. The book is a few years old but as I remember it I want to say the average pay for a top secret cleared generic 'analyst' was in the $150k+ range, more if you're in a valuable specialty. Then the real kicker, most of them justify their own jobs and contracts, oversight consists of reading that justification, which I guess isn't totally unusual for government work but since they're contractors it's a little odd.. It's not performance based.