Vice Media to be Acquired by George Soros and Fortress | Hacker News Reader

Vice Media to be Acquired by George Soros and Fortress

wsj.com

44 pointsbaremetal30 comments

"Old Vice": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI

"New Vice": https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...

Hopefully they can regain their conscience and quality.

Lol. "regain"

Vice started as a sketchy drug-party style mag, with sketchy advertisers like American Apparel running lolicon spreads. That they became an important investigative news outlet is just wild, and a damning indictment of the post-Regan media regime.

The weirdest Vice factoid is that it shares a founder with the Proud Boys.

Also, obligatory "how Vice comes up with article ideas:" https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ia7fUQXskvA

I find nothing weird about a party boy like Gavin McInnes founding a drug culture mag to hang out in the scene, and then aging into a fascie impresario. That's a whole trope.

I always saw Vice as an edgy left wing liberal magazine, whereas the Proud Boys are "far right."

Horse shoe theory.

I guess you came in for the later version of vice.com.

Vice was more sybaritic than political. It started as a Montreal punk zine (on newsprint!) with politics I'd call gen-x party-art-anarchist more than anything easily mapped to US left/right axes. You'll also note there were lots of libertarians voting for Trump, whose libertarianism is focused on drugs and the age of consent. It's a big tent, and there are lots of fascie hipsters. Just look at their haircuts!

But people change as they age, and partying for the sake of partying is a gruelling habit. I love this line: "In their pitch to me, Shane literally said, ‘I’m tired of doing blow on naked models. I want to do something that matters,’ ” says Kate Albright-Hanna, a filmmaker who joined the company in 2009 after working on the Obama campaign." [0] Smith would have been freshly 40, and ready to do something else with his little empire.

The founders have been trying to get out, and I guess it's now owned by the Murdochs and Disney? That's probably the incarnation you know.

[0] - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/inside-vice-media-sh...

> left wing liberal

Liberals aren’t (outside of maybe the 18th century, when the two concepts had a somrwhat common origin story) anything like left-wing, and vice versa.

A better peer comparison would be The eXile. And look and what doofuses those two aged into.

Reminds me of how Family Guy writes their episodes: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qTC9j0QpCBM

American Apparel was a clothes store. It’s not even remotely sketchy the way you’re implying

They were famous for ads that looked like softcore porn, featuring very young-looking models. Calling that lolicon is fair enough.

The _stores_ may have been mall outlets selling pedestrian jersey knits, but the _advertising_ consisted of the founder (another skeezy gen-x money boy from Montréal) "encouraging" his workers to take their clothing off and sleep with him while he took photos. I'm quite sure any American Apparel/Vice promo parties were super fun as well as sketchy-druggy-pedo-adjacent affairs.

I'm not gonna google your lolicon for you, but start with "american apparel scandal ads" and fill your boots.

Naomi Wu is a great maker and overall technology oriented hacker. The work she has done for the 3D printing community in terms of engineering and promoting higher quality hardware has been a godsend. As an aside, could you explain what you mean by Vice having lost their conscience?

At risk of being called a crank, hasnt there been some accusations shes a CPC/CCP asset?

Since COVID she's been much more pro-CCP. It's unclear how much of this is because of the true fact that she was genuinely very, very upset with how much of the western world handled COVID, and believed heavily in the CCP's zero-COVID policy (as a moral position). Versus how much is whether the CCP started pressuring/threatening her after the Vice news stories reached their desks and they realized she was the most-followed Chinese influencer on the internet.

I imagine that the way Vice treated her may have encouraged her to rethink any previous lionization of Western culture. But also anyone working in electronics and embedded systems sees a growing divide where all the real work is happening in Shenzhen and Taiwan -- and if you're not there and dont read/write chinese, it's really hard to push boundaries. So, living and breathing the space of embedded electronics can also lead to an idea that China/Taiwan is infinitely far ahead of the West.

> Hopefully they can regain their conscience and quality.

I think you need to research more about the entity who bought Vice out first and why Vice went downhill following their cash infusion of $250M of funding for the company. [0]

[0] https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/vice-media-250-million...

Apparently I was ignorant of a lot of Vice's history, not just ignorant about things in past 5 years. Learned a lot from this discussion, thank you.

It amazes me that anyone would take "her" view seriously after the LTT claims became public. So many lies, for a little publicity. If anything, doing some research afterwards convinced me Vice probably was onto something.

I'm sure this won't fuel any conspiracy theory.

Jokes aside, the last time I saw good content on VICE it was probably during the Russian invasion of Crimea. No wonder they went bankrupt.

It seems VICE like many media outlets in the age of social media couldn't decide whether to just shovel clickbait for easy profit or become a real news organization. It's actual news coverage was pretty good but you had to wade through a mountain of clickbait BS to find it. You can't be both.

Quite a while ago now, they used to have some crazy international journalism in war zones. It was almost irresponsible toward their journalists, but the coverage was pretty incredible.

That didn’t last very long though, and I haven’t thought about them in years.

The kind of provocative and factually incorrect reporting they used to do of other countries was mind boggling too. I used to wonder what their editing team was doing. Looks like they were doing NOTHING

What a bummer - those guys are going to be around forever.

I misread this at first and thought it said George Santos. That would have been so much fun.

I was hoping they would go under. Now we get even further slanted zombie Vice. Bring back the zine days or let it die.

https://archive.ph/hb8iz

Highly recommend the documentary “Goodnight, Brooklyn” if anyone loves indie/punk music and is still unconvinced of how hypocritical Vice is. It shows the artist space Death By Audio being forced out as Vice sets up their new HQ in Williamsburg. Great concert footage.

David Carr (RIP, NYT) vs Some guys from Vice: https://youtu.be/iLmkec_4Rfo

Never used Vice and will defiantly avoid at all costs now.

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