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Comment by time0ut | Hacker News Reader

I used to read Vice when I wanted to know the details the rest of the media wouldn’t report on. The last time I read it was a few months ago. I was curious about the real facts around a certain incident. Instead of a unique perspective, I found the exact same lazy story as I saw on every other website. Plus a large helping of the boring divisive “culture war” crap that is so popular now - complete with actual naked quote mining of those the author disagreed with. How far Vice has fallen.

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Vice seems to have fallen victim to the increased polarization and agenda-ridden stories that have swept up so many media companies. They used to report on unique angles, find edgy topics to talk about...the last few years they regurgitate the same left-leaning talking points that one can find in any number of other media outlets.

They lost their soul and became what they probably used to hate.

>They lost their soul

They accepted funding from large media companies (Disney), and got rid most of their founding members, and original employees replacing them with "journalists" that largely float around between those properties that "regurgitate the same left-leaning talking points"

And in between all that is a sprinkling of truly high quality journalists who are doing none of that crap.

As I said elsewhere in this thread, I really hope they'll find a new home somewhere - where the context for their work is not being ruined by all the one sided culture wars "reporting". Oh, and all the drugs stuff.

I'm truly over the divisiveness so prevalent seemingly everywhere. Please let some nuance in, perhaps magic will happen.

Given they were forced to file bankruptcy on behest of their creditors whom are taking over the company, both of which are highly political and partisan (including George Soros) I would not hold my breath for a return to "quality journalism" anytime soon

I was specifically wishing for the actual quality journalists to find a better place to continue their excellent work.

The problem is that Vice kind of stories are costly to produce. And are not sensational enough to get a lot of clicks.

It's easier to do a typical 'Culture War' fear mongering type content and get easy clicks.

Also, I think we are in an echo chamber where if you don't report on comment on the latest topic, you might be perceived to belong to the other side.

The West seems to lump issues into "Good" vs "Evil". Leaving no space for News media in grey area to succeed.

I can't think of any 'Moderate' News source that is massively successful. Most of the mainstream ones can easily be classified into one camp or the other. May be just degree of devotion to the camp differs.

I keep hearing these kind of arguments about in-depth reporting being costly.

Vice went bankrupt when it stopped producing those stories.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Media in 2016, Vice was making $1B ($10^9) with 3000 employees. ~$330,000 / employee. Can probably afford some plane flights and investigative telephone calls.

Per standard work year, every employee's 'supposedly' working 2080 hrs a year. ~6M work hours. You can write a lot of interesting stories, and follow a lot of leads other people are not looking at with 6M hours / year.

If you follow the "copy sensational click" route, you end up with a lot of local media, where it looks like somebody just copied the local police arrest report.

You don't stand out by just copying / dopplegangering whatever looks shiny.

Sometimes (not sure if this what happened here) an organization that works well oversells growth to its investors, and the only way to reach growth is to juice metrics in the most mechanical way possible, destroying what made the organization add value in the first place.

It's a profitable and effective political tactic to force a position on every issue and flush out fence sitters. Even in this thread you've got people classifying institutions by how aggressively they toe the line on one by one political bugbears.

But not profitable enough to avoid bankruptcy?

For political parties, not news organizations.

People keep making the mistake of thinking these organizations are driven by "clicks." They're not, they don't make any money anyway. They're driven by eyes, specifically the right eyes, and impact. They don't need to sell ads, the stories are the ads; they need to sell the stories.

Deutsche Welle seems pretty balanced

Breaking Points (to me at least) fills that middle ground where both sides are open for attack and worth defending.

They have been Intercepted (partnered with the Intercept mainly funded by billionaire Omidyhar). I observe them starting to follow the path of Vice.

> The problem is that Vice kind of stories are costly to produce.

Perhaps. But now look how costly it is not to produce them. You can "save" by being a commodity, but eventually the (missed) opportunity cost (of doing something unique) will catch up to you.

NPR

NPR was great 10 years ago, but they've also gone all-in on the culture war since then. There's a podcast/Youtube series that was linked here a while ago called All Things Reconsidered that does a good job breaking it down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPvNucxB7TI

Very interesting video that verbalizes many thoughts I’ve privately had. I agree that NPR has gotten more sensational and hive minded over the recent years. I was pledging 10 years ago or so, not anymore.

Lately I was trying PBS because it’s pretty dry, but they’re also quite left leaning no?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Ug2-Ou2Rc

No PBS is not left leaning. At least in my opinion. One thing I noticed about PBS is they always bring up both sides of the argument. And when they have people on to give opinions they have two people that a very mild mannered and speak eloquently. I also see them report on stories that you would see on either fox news or cnn but it's all facts, and almost always never opinion. It's kind of refreshing to watch. I think that is the reason is seems dry, because what they present are the facts of the story. There is no emotion added in and there is no hidden suggestion to try to alter your emotions.

Do they? I read the website regularly and I feel like I never see culture war bullshit?

Perhaps it's the case that the "culture war" isn't a thing media "goes in" on... It's a thing that's happening, and media can either choose to report it or pretend it's not occuring?

... but there's a lot about how the world works these days that just... Doesn't make a lot of sense if we pretend people don't care passionately about some fundamental divisions.

NPR has always seemed more neutral than actively tacking toward a moderate position.

For all that don’t know you have a text only version: https://text.npr.org/

I love NPR I am just a little sad that for the past 2 years it feels like they switched from raw boring neutral to a little bit left.

The political analysis suggests that NPR has remained pretty stationary; what has swung is that America grew a vocal far-right wing with enough political clout to be heard in the conversation, and that pushed the national centroid away from where NPR sits.

In a world where Tucker Carlson has had a successful television commentary career that didn't immediately result in every show sponsor pulling up stakes and leaving until his networks bade him go elsewhere, NPR looks liberal.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunda...

I think people often use "liberal" to mean left-leaning, whereas it's really more like center-right Democrat. If NPR were left-leaning, for example https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1137640529/railroads-freight-... wouldn't be titled "Largest rail union rejects contract, stoking fears of a strike" and have a first paragraph of "On the eve of the holiday season, workers at the heart of the supply chain are once again threatening to strike.". Fear the threatening workers. A left-leaning report would emphasize the struggle the workers are having negotiating with the exploitative corporations running the railways, and how Biden and congress pretend to be pro-labor but vote against the workers.

The modern leftism in the US hasn't been about working class for a long time. They use the same Marxist tactic of class divide but apply them to identities like race and gender to divide people in to oppressor and oppressed, and stoke up the current "culture war" to silent political opponent and gain money and power.

I just opened vice news from a North American location and went through the headlines. The politicization is through the roof, and the headlines do not match the context. I am sure there is a market for this type of journalism, but it is much smaller these days because every org left and right is doing it.

The funding mechanism of these organizations reveals a lot about the trajectory. Some start out with a lot of seed money with few restrictions. If they start to rely on big advertisers or funding from 'philanthropists', the content is usually influenced by these sources. The best publications I find these days are funded by donations from readers. This keeps them independent and not beholden to those big funders. Fund the good organizations via Patreon, Locals, Substack, direct.. to keep them honest.

I find it strange that it seemingly isn't mentioned in the top comments but the thing that killed Vice was simple: twitter.

It took down a lot of cultural media landmarks by usurping their relevance, Vice was one of the big ones.

They needed to move at the speed of gossip with takes that were truly original in order to survive. they didn't.

Media seems to all be A/B testing itself into the same bland editorial slants.

What is the difference reading NYT, WaPo, Atlantic, Vice, or a dozen other NY/DC based media sites?

Vice had a unique style of coverage 10-15 years ago but that definitely ended by/in the Trump era.

The NY/DC duopoly on media is largely because they have the footprint to be everywhere and write with depth and accuracy. Read the NYT and Axios and you'll have all you need on politics and world news. The ascent of independent media (the substack/podcast crowd) has started to take a huge bite out of the opinion/analysis market. The damage is coming in the middle. All the local newspapers and evening news shows are approaching irrelevance and it's going to be a disaster.

Having lived in a neighborhood popular with mid/late career journalists and editorial writers for the NYT, I can say that half of what I read there was a parochial take on life in Carrol Gardens in Brooklyn dressed up as something about the US at large.

Yes.

The media neighborhood shifted from UWS to Brooklyn maybe 10 years back, and so have all the media thought pieces.

I'm a staunch support of the NY Times, but their Style section can be truly obnoxious. I appreciate they need to pay the bills and throwing a few bones to the white upper-middle class probably has pretty high ROI.

The whole of "Nice White Parents" was laser focused on the narrow obsessions of the French expat enclave in Cobble Hill[1] and their awkward interactions with the residents of the Gowanus Houses during a short period when the aforementioned French parents were pushing for a French immersion program in the neighborhood school. But the whole thing is presented as though it represents national problems and trends. It was ridiculous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobble_Hill,_Brooklyn

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gowanus+Houses/@40.6837838...

The Real Estate section is pretty bad too.. and the "Magazine" & "T magazine" (not sure what the diff is but they are 2 entities in the menu)

Axios falls into the media reporting on media reporting on media trope that I absolutely hate. Twitter is full of enough of that already.

The first thing I see when I land there today is "Scoop: How Trump's team egged him on during CNN town hall".

Honestly - who cares. How is it even a story? Water is wet.

I grew up reading a lot more business news because 1) a lot of time money is the tail that wags that dog and 2) it doesn't get caught up in these tropes as often.

Bloomberg differentiates a lot from the Borg collective in that regard.

Honestly the left probably needs a Murdoch style maniac to conglomerate left of center partisan media into one megacorp at this point before they all OEM themselves to death. Fox basically has the entire right of center mind share while the left of center battle for the same viewers by providing stunningly similar content.

I used to read WSJ more often but their Op-Ed page has really gone off the deep end into Trump cheerleading which is not what I expected. My primaries are probably NY Times and NPR really, but I like Axios and am watching Semafor with interest. Otherwise, I have a slate of indies I check in on (Marcy Wheeler and Claudia Sahm are always interesting), but I've genuinely lost some of that when I quit twitter. I like the CNN homepage just because it's so broad. Like I'll never seek out celebrity news, but it's good to see whatever has bubbled up to the top of the national consciousness.

I don't think the left can really support a true maniac on par with Tucker Carlson. They tried Air America with Al Franken years ago and it was not bad, but didn't resonate. I remember a host trying to say the 2004 election was stolen by Republicans and I just turned it off. Don't remember who it was, but she didn't get any traction reading from the right-wing play book.

I don't mean the left needs a demagogue, I mean they need a business conglomerate to consolidate & compete.

Another good alternative to WSJ is FT. FT & Bloomberg subscriptions cost about 10x what WSJ does though. For me I am happier paying for one (or both of them) + NYT, than 15 different NYT-alikes.

NYT is by far the best at it. There’s a reason they’re not bankrupt and Vice is. Vice wouldn’t have gone bankrupt if they had stuck to their niche

AP News with an adblocker is solid too - half the time everyone else is just referncing an AP article / journalist anyways!

My go to is NPR, AP, and Al Jazeera for non US centric stuff.

The left already has a liber version of Tucky - Bill Maher I guess?

And the weird part of it all is how they have all moved to more and more restrictive paywalls over this time period.

Why would I maintain 5-10 subscriptions for content that is 80% the same?

I think the streaming video services are speed running the same issue. As a very casual TV watcher, why would I bother to pay $10ish each to NFLX, Disney, Hulu, Peacock, Paramount, HBO, Apple for the 1-2 shows each I may care about.

In a way its not even the total cost, its maintaining accounts/billing info/worrying about cancellation policies across a dozen companies.

5 Years ago I stopped sailing....

Today the winds are strong, and the sailing is very good...

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