VICE as RI subject

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VICE as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Aug 29, 2017 1:20 am

About that VICE Charlottesville documentary

In the past few days a large number of my friends have been bringing up the VICE News documentary on the Charlottesville Nazi riots / protests.
As goes much of their content, the show was incredibly produced, thoroughly entertaining, and led to many messages of “we’re all fucked, the world is going to end”. That’s what they do, and they do it well.

A few things, however, to remind yourself as your rage builds:

Follow the Money
Rupert Murdoch invested $70 million into VICE in August 2013. It was his investment that set VICE on the rocketship path that has them now at a private-equity juiced $4.5 billion. Remember, VICE had been around since 1994, but Murdoch was one of the earliest media mogul to see massive potential in the decades old punk magazine. It was the type of company he knows so well.

The idea of a 70 year old white guy sitting on his couch watching Fox News and lamenting the destruction of our country by forces they fear (Gays! Blacks! Liberals!!) is one most of my friends mock with glee. Yet here we are, a portfolio company of the media genius that created the entire right wing tabloid machine’s is convincing a whole other demographic that the world is coming to an end. Anger and fear sell.

News as Porn
VICE News’ production value is unparalleled. Their storytelling is superb. Watch any of their segments and you will walk away having seen some positively insane characters, and with a sinking feeling in your stomach (their ISIS doc was one of the best things I’ve seen).
But, when watching a segment, try to be conscious of what makes it so appealing. It doesn’t get you ‘up there’ — it gets you ‘down there’. It’s visceral, exhilarating, titillating, horrifying. Every animalistic adjective you can conjure up. It’s a series of exaggerated characters that create an extreme view of reality. It’s an appeal to your most base instincts that creates a distorted perception of the world.
If politics on CNN are sport, on VICE they’re porn.

Aren’t Nazis Scary?
Yes. I’m brown. Dabbling in punk music led to encounters with some scary skinhead types. The American History X ‘bite the curb’ scene still gives me nightmares. The fact that Nazis are openly waving their flag in America, enabled by our President, is scary as hell.
Christopher Cantwell is terrifying. But you kind of knew from the moment he started speaking, he’d be a central character. He also happens to be a radio host who has been creating media for years now. The guy knows what to say to have an impact. He’s been training for this forever.
But coincidentally he was the one to let VICE ride in the van, and give one-on-one time (3 hours in fact). He definitely seems scary, but he’s also a media guy. This was his opus, and VICE gave it to him.

Distribution Matters
Brian Stelter of CNN picked up on an incredibly important detail. Normally HBO releases clips of their shows for free (why John Oliver is available as segments and not the full episode).

While HBO is fighting hackers that are leaking Game of Thrones, in this case, they effectively “leaked” the episode in full right after the airing.

All of your friends and your Mom didn’t just happen to come across the VICE Charlottesville episode. It was very strategically executed. I’ve previously argued that what makes HBO content so great is it’s subscription-based so doesn’t need to try to steal your attention. It’s no coincidence that the first completely free HBO show happened to be the most over-the-top.

Well, then what?
The fact that Nazis publicly took to the street is horrifying. There is no question our country is in trouble. Trump’s press conference yesterday made this infinitely worse (did anyone really think it would get better before it got worse?)

However, the more we accept sensationalism as grounded reality, we’re screwed. As long as we let our lizard brain control our perception of the world, we don’t stand a chance. If we’re not at the very least conscious of the incentives behind what we’re watching, the crazies will always win.

This is billion dollar media, funded by the same guy who owns Fox. It’s perfected the art of getting you down there. Remember, in a world where we’re all spending 116 minutes a day consuming ad-funded social media, the loudest voice will always win.

And they’re certainly winning.


Ranjan Roy
Cofounder @theedge_group— Intelligent Industry News


Vice Media: A Five-Part Series
Daniel Voshart (Not Vice)

1. Everyone is Laughing at VICE
How Vice could become a source of real news —even journalism — but…

2. Fact Checking Vice: A Fiction.
Vice Media brings reality TV ethics to the documentary format.

3. Shane Smith: ‘Billionaire’ and ‘Regular Guy’
A guide to Vice Media’s confidence man.

4. Branding VICE (Updated)
The novel (and probably illegal) ways Vice feeds you bullshit.

https://notvice.com/series/home


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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby Elvis » Tue Aug 29, 2017 2:52 am

Good thread. I'm curious. I only know Vice from talk and links here on this board, but was always kinda leery. If I knew Murdoch was a big investor, I'd forgotten.
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby km artlu » Tue Aug 29, 2017 6:04 am

Christopher Cantwell is terrifying.


He sure is. Melodramatically so. How to appeal to the .00001%. I ain't buying this guy's act. It's just too perfectly, over-the-top repugnant. If it looks, acts, and quacks like a three-letter agency asset, it might be one.
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby cptmarginal » Tue Aug 29, 2017 7:42 am

Image

I was looking at the CFR website's board of directors list yesterday and noticed that Fareed Zakaria is one of them:

http://www.cfr.org/about/people/board_of_directors.html

He's also on the board of the Trilateral Commission:

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/anchors_reporter ... areed.html

And a Bilderberg attendee:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fareed_Zakaria

Plus he's on the board of Yale, and is a member of the Scroll & Key secret society there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_and_Key

He gave a talk entitled "AMERICA IN A NEW WORLD" at the Bohemian Grove gathering of 2006, among such highlights from other speakers as "GLOBAL FINANCIAL WARRIORS" & "UNTOLD TALES FROM THE COLD WAR"

http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.com/bo ... s2006.html


The HBO show really sucks most of the time but I am still a big fan of their back catalog of online-only documentaries. Plus F*ck That's Delicious is one of my top three food shows of all time, though it's not for everyone.
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby kelley » Tue Aug 29, 2017 8:09 am

the foundation upon which vice was built was what would now be understood as the dirtbag left

it's instructive to see how ideologically close this description is at times to the alt-right

one was satire

the other is serious

therein for me lies the difference
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 29, 2017 10:33 am

I had an essay I was working on, several computers ago, called "Fareed Zakaria Does Not Exist." It was about media pundits and their ecosystem, which is demanding -- so demanding that pundits don't have time to do their own reading, analysis, or writing.

The fact he's is CFR, Bilderberg and Trilateral Golf Club is too perfect. They might as well fill that seat with a cardboard cutout, for all the energy and thought that Fareed brings to the table for them. He is a vector for performing the work of ghostwriters.

Vice has a cool half dozen people embedded in Alt-Right and White Nationalist circles these days, so I was less taken aback by their Charlottesville documentary & the level of access they were given. That demographic is far more likely to trust Vice as a brand name than CNN or PBS. They treated the camera like it was a chatroom, just freestyling from their depository of poses and phrases, and the rest was just editing.

(Not implying that "editing" made them look evil & scary, but stating the hopefully inoffensive fact it was editing to make them look more evil & scary. It is interesting that Vice did more to humanize ISIS than the toothless skinhead breeders calling for genocide.)

There is quite a bit to dig up once you look at Vice as a tool for getting intelligence assets into tricky situations, much like Red Cross, the Peace Corps and Doctors Without Borders. Their infrastructure, both physical and financial, speaks volumes about their goals & charter.
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Aug 29, 2017 11:49 am

David Carr (rip) interviews Shane Smith and crew from Page One, a doc on the NYT:



SMITH: Well, I’ve got to tell you one thing: I’m a regular guy and I go to
these places and I go, “Okay, everyone talked to me about cannibalism, right?
Everyone talked about cannibalism.” Now I’m getting a lot of shit for talking
about cannibalism. Whatever. Everyone talked to me about cannibalism! …
That’s fucking crazy! So the actual — our audience goes, “That’s fucking
insane, like, that’s nuts!” And the New York Times, meanwhile, is writing about
surfing, and I’m sitting there going like, “You know what? I’m not going to
talk about surfing, I’m going to talk about cannibalism, because that fucks
me up.”

CARR: Just a sec, time out. Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide. Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do. So continue.





Shane Smith Talks About ‘The Vice Guide To
Liberia’ (VIDEO)
By Nicholas Sabloff

While perhaps best known for their notoriously no-holds-barred counterculture magazine, in recent years
the guys behind Vice have been branching out by making their way to some of the world’s more troubled
spots to produce travel documentaries from the front line. In keeping with the Vice style, the films are
edgy, unfiltered, and unapologetic about their brash pursuit of extreme subjects. While they eschew the
kind of studied neutrality that tends to dominate foreign reporting, Vice’s more transparent approach
appears to be something that the mainstream media is increasingly interested in showcasing, judging by
the recently announced partnership between CNN and the company’s online video site, VBS.tv.
In their latest film, “The Vice Guide to Liberia,” which debuted in serial form this month on VBS.tv, Vice cofounder
Shane Smith heads deep into the heart of a country left ravaged by brutal civil wars. As he makes
his way around Liberia he encounters staggering poverty, squalor, and drug-addiction, and catches up
with a number of notorious ex-warlords with colorful names such as General Rambo and General Butt
Naked, the latter having gotten his name based on his style of dress, or rather undress, during combat.
The film provides a rare and revealing look at a troubled country that is once again teetering on the brink
of collapse.

HuffPost recently caught up with Smith by phone to talk to him about the new film. [All 8 parts are now
available to watch on VBS. Scroll down to the bottom for a preview.

HUFFINGTON POST: You’ve done a number of travel films now, such as the “Vice Guide to North Korea.”
What initially got you into making these travel documentaries?

SHANE SMITH: Well, when we started expanding the magazine, every country we went to, they had these
crazy stories, and we were like ‘wow, that’d be great, why don’t we do that.’ So we went and got cameras
and very publicly went to film production school doing the “Vice Guide to Travel.” Even though we didn’t
do a very good job on it, people really liked it, and so we realized there were a lot of people that wanted
to see this stuff. We went to Bulgaria where they were selling warheads on the black market, to Chernobyl,
to Congo.

HUFFINGTON POST: You mention in the film that Vice has long been fascinated by Liberia, and cite the
fact that it’s America’s only foray into colonialism in Africa. What initially got you interested?

SHANE SMITH: In the magazine we had written about General Butt Naked, who fought naked and his
warriors fought naked, versus the Tupac army, named so because they had stolen a container that had all
Tupac Shakur t-shirts, so that became the sort of military dress. It was stuff like that, weird cultural
anomalies. [You can read the article, “Gen. Butt Naked vs. The Tupac Army,” here]

HUFFINGTON POST: The situation in Liberia, whether it be the violence or the poverty or the mounds of
rotting garbage that are everywhere, appears pretty bleak. What surprised you most about the country
during your time there?

SHANE SMITH: Cannibalism was a big deal. How many people talked about it, how it was sort of
prevalent. During the war, people would eat human flesh for necessity, but also for ritual. And it still
continues. People would point at the old Masonic Lodge and say, ‘Oh, there was a lot of cannibalism
there.’ Some of it is probably rumor and some of it is urban myth, but every single person you talk to is like
‘oh, yeah, yeah.’ And cannibalism is just something you never experience, or talk about over dinner; it’s
never a discussion you’re used to having. And when you talk about it all day with everyone you meet, it
starts to get a little bit unsettling. I’d say 90 percent of my conversations had some sort of cannibalism in
them.

HUFFINGTON POST: You end the film talking about the possibility of the UN mission leaving Liberia in the
near future and the consequences that could have. Do you think all hell is likely to break loose if they go?

SHANE SMITH: One of the things I came away with is there are a lot of ex-combatants, a lot of them, who
have known nothing but war, are starving, living in slums. They have access to weapons, there are
generals who will lead them, who are starving as well, and there’s been no effort to help these guys get
back into society, in fact it’s quite the opposite. So you have these guys who’ve got nothing, they’re
starving, and if you take away the only barrier between them and food and a mansion on the beach, and
they have the guns and kids to do it, and they’re starving too. There’s not a lot of conjecture there, you
know what I mean. It’s ripe.

HUFFINGTON POST: So how was the experience of traveling through Liberia different from, say, Iran or
North Korea?

SHANE SMITH: At any time, anywhere you would go, you’d be surrounded by 30, 40, 50 kids, and young
people and whomever, and they all wanted money, they’re all starving. And if we didn’t have generals with
us we would have been totally fucked up and if we hadn’t quite frankly lucked out a couple of times we
would have been fucked up.

HUFFINGTON POST: You mean they would have just jumped you?

SHANE SMITH: Oh, for sure. The crime rate in Monrovia is astronomical. The crime rate in West Point [a
notorious slum] is even higher. If you have 80 percent unemployment, you can do the math: 80 percent of
the population is doing something criminal then just to survive. And there’s not a lot of opportunity to get
cash, so if some guy comes in with a car and a camera and a fucking nice pair of shoes, it’s more money
than they’ve ever seen. So that part was scary.

HUFFINGTON POST: Perhaps the most interesting character you chronicle is General Butt Naked, who
was once a particularly brutal warlord, but has since reformed and become a preacher. You mention that
you found him endearing, but also the unease you feel about liking a man who has, by his own account,
personally killed as many as 20,000 people, some of which he says he cannibalized. Looking back on it
now, how do you think about your time with him?

SHANE SMITH: I’ve got to say, it’s a very strange thing. I went into Liberia and it was scary, and there were
generals, and they were bad guys, and there’s a lot of crime and a lot of poverty. And then I met this guy,
and he’s charming and he’s nice, and he goes to church and the churches are nice and everything is
calmer when he’s around. And then you start to go, ‘oh, this is nice.’ And then when you’re in your bed at
night you go, this guy killed and ate people for a living. He was fucking one of the worst people in the
history of warfare. It spins your brain out. It’s confusing.

HUFFINGTON POST: By now you’ve no doubt traversed a good amount of the globe. Is there anywhere in
the world you are really dying to see or report on?

SHANE SMITH: I really want to do the kingdom of Mustang where like 100 percent of their GDP is making
meth for Chinese prisons.

I want to go to the Maldives before they sink, but just because it’s the most beautiful place on earth. And I
really want to go to Mongolia. It’s just apparently totally insane.

There’s actually a place in Russia that has sort of North Korean slave workers sent by the North Korean
government sent for money and resources and stuff that I want to go see. And I want to go to Vladivostok
while I’m there because they make this huge mountain out of garbage and then just shove it into the sea.

Watch the entire “Vice Guide to Liberia” here.
Last edited by liminalOyster on Tue Aug 29, 2017 12:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Aug 29, 2017 12:12 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 29, 2017 3:33 pm wrote:There is quite a bit to dig up once you look at Vice as a tool for getting intelligence assets into tricky situations, much like Red Cross, the Peace Corps and Doctors Without Borders. Their infrastructure, both physical and financial, speaks volumes about their goals & charter.


No doubt at all. But at what point was that infrastructure tapped? And was their role in obliterating the possibility of a counterculture incidental only? I mean this as illustrative preposterous fantasy but still - can't you just picture the meeting where these guys presented what they've done with Williamsburg as proof of (geopolitical) concept? Just watch what we can do for Iraq ...

Edit: I mean, did Shane stumble on the idea of reinventing imperialism ground up? Or was it politely suggested to him....
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 29, 2017 1:02 pm

I would never propose that Shane Smith has any values or goals outside of Shane Smith.

The fact his company provides cut-out cover is, perhaps, merely "cool" to him, something to whisper to hot women in nice bars. Certainly, being part of the spook complex is good business in terms of the protection it affords, as well.

But it's also important to consider how easy it would be to make a corporation into a cut-out without the owners even noticing. It happens.
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Aug 29, 2017 1:21 pm

The (remaining) founders are clearly a pretty manipulable bunch and seem like, even if they did notice (or care), could be placated easily with money and cachet, maybe even patriotism. But Gavin McInnes conspicuous emergence as *something* over the past two years has me curious if there isn't something more substantive going on. Apparently he left Taki and Rebel Media both this month and is headed on to a newer high profile venture shortly.
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Aug 29, 2017 6:09 pm

Take with a grain of salt given author and source both.

VICE founder, famous for truth telling, has history of lies

Posted By Charles C. Johnson On 12:18 AM 07/03/2013 In | 1 Comment

Media mogul Shane Smith is often heralded for revealing unvarnished truths about the world, but the man behind the VICE empire often lies about himself and his company, sources close to Smith tell The Daily Caller.

As head of VICE, a magazine and media company he says is worth a billion dollars with hundreds of employees, Smith has become the subject of fawning profiles and interviews in the New Yorker, The Financial Times, Playboy, the New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and on Charlie Rose.

He’s even snagged his own television show on HBO, becoming the face of the network’s first foray into journalism. But a single show is not enough for Smith. “I want to build the next CNN with Vice—it’s within my grasp,” Smith told the Guardian in May.

“Who’s heard of Vice Media? Wild, interesting effort to interest millennials who don’t read or watch established media. Global success,” tweeted Rupert Murdoch after a meeting with Smith.

Murdoch’s not the only media executive to meet with Smith — representatives from Hearst, Time Warner, Bertelsmann, Condé Nast, and even Google and YouTube have all met with him. Many have partnered with Smith.

But Smith already has a well-documented reputation for stretching the truth.

“The lie that launched an empire,” reads a section title in Smith’s Globe and Mail profile, referring to his penchant for overstating VICE’s value.

“Vice was built on lies,” Wired Magazine echoed in 2007.

And sources close to Smith, including former employees and friends, tell The Daily Caller that his career has long been paved with pure untruths.

In May 2007, Smith told Patrick Sisson in a Playboy interview that he was a wartime reporter for Reuters in Bosnia.

“You wrote for Reuters in Bosnia in the 1990s,” Sisson began in the Playboy interview. “Did that experience affect how you viewed the world and the way you look at Vice?”

“Definitely,” Smith replied. “I went down to Serbia and Croatia during the war. I covered the ethnic cleansing and did a big thing on [former Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz] Tito,” he said.

The Financial Times also credited Smith with doing some work for the Budapest Sun, in addition to Reuters.

“[Smith] moved to Hungary, freelancing for the Budapest Sun and Reuters, and carved a lucrative, yet precarious, sideline as a currency hedger,” wrote Matthew Garrahan in December 2012.

But representatives for both the Budapest Sun and Reuters told TheDC that neither company has a record of Smith ever working for them, let alone a massive story on Tito under his byline, which he would have had to write in his early twenties.

Additionally, a records search of Google, Lexis Nexis and Factiva provided no documented journalism from Smith until well past 2004.

Alex Detrick, VICE’s communications director, repeatedly confirmed that Smith had worked at Reuters and the Budapest Sun in a series of text messages, emails, and a phone call with TheDC. Detrick did not reply when asked directly why it was that Reuters and the Budapest Sun have no record of Smith’s relationship with either organization.

According to friends, Smith was actually teaching a Berlitz English course in Hungary at the time.

“He was teaching English in the mid-90’s,” childhood friend Patrick Bannister told TheDC in an interview. “I don’t think he was working for Reuters, but you’d have to check with him.”

“No way was he at Reuters,” agreed a VICE insider, “He called himself a poet or something.”

Smith did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this report.

In the Playboy interview, Smith went on to criticize the journalists he said he saw in Bosnia as a Reuters correspondent.

“When I was there, you’d see the Croatian stringers go out and get the story and tell the Americans what happened, and then they would stand in front of a burning car and say this is what is going on,” Smith said. “It was total bullshit. These huge media machines are cranking out this shit.”

That characterization belies the risk that reporters truly faced in Bosnia, according to Smith’s critics. Producer David Kaplan of ABC News, for instance, was killed by a sniper bullet while traveling in a motorcade of journalists. More than 50 journalists were killed in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1994, according to The New York Times.

And Smith’s attacks on professional journalists — a regular occurrence — don’t always sit well with those closest to him.

“Smith’s whole thing is to criticize the work of other journalists,” says a longtime insider with VICE who declined to speak on the record. “He’s dismissive of real journalists and doesn’t understand that their methodology has a purpose of actually finding out what’s true, rather than just hyping things.”

David Carr of the New York Times publicly criticized Smith on video for that anti-journalist attitude in the 2011 documentary “Page One: Inside the New York Times.” Smith, interviewed by Carr, criticized the Times for “writing about surfing” and not the human tragedy of Liberia he saw when he went there for “The Vice Guide to Liberia,” an online video.

“I’m sitting there going like, ‘You know? I’m not going to talk about surfing, I’m going to talk about cannibalism, because that fucks me up,’” Smith said.

“Just a sec, time out,” Carr interrupted. “Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide,” he fumed. “Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do. So, continue.”

“I’m just saying that I’m not a journalist. I’m not there to report…” Smith replied.

“Yeah, obviously,” Carr shot back.

That exchange didn’t make it into Carr’s final 2010 article. Instead, he wrote a glowing profile of Smith, praising his videographic work as “pretty rugged, pretty wonderful,” especially his work on North Korea.

Only later did it emerge that Carr’s daughter, Erin Lee Carr, was hired by VICE after the scene was shot, but before the Times documentary came out. In interviews with TheDC, multiple VICE insiders suggested that Smith was trying to curry favor with Carr and the Times. The younger Carr did not respond to a request for comment.

Smith presents himself as having mastered multiple media, chief among them online video, but he got his start generally in what he calls the “holy grail of film” with his 2007 movie, “Heavy Metal in Baghdad.”

“We made [the movie about Baghdad’s only heavy metal band] for an online piece 20 minutes long,” he said to Charlie Rose. “Our editor said ‘Hey, this is a feature film’ and we said ‘OK cut it,’ and he cut it and it cost us $25,000. And it went on to win critic’s choice at Toronto Film Festival. It won best doc at Berlin Film Festival. Went on to be in 84 film festivals and we made a lot of money out of it.”

He’s repeated variations of that story to comedian Joe Rogan and Adweek, but some light research reveals “Heavy Metal in Baghdad” — while screened at both festivals — never won either of those awards.

“We don’t have a special category for ‘Best Documentary,’” although selected documentaries are shown there, explained Christine Maslok of the Berlin Film Festival.

The Critic’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival also doesn’t exist, according to a representative from the group.

Nor was the movie screened at 84 film festivals, as Smith has claimed, according to IMDB or to those who worked on the movie.

Smith’s most famous work concerns the hermit kingdom — a 2008 film called “The Vice Guide to North Korea.” VICE has done three documentaries about North Korea. Smith stars in two of them.

Smith has often stated that he had to bribe his way into the country. He even told Charlie Rose that North Korea is the “holy grail of journalism because you can’t get in.”

Not so, says Andray Abrahamian, a North Korea expert who has been there ten or eleven times and runs Choson Exchange, a Singaporean organization dedicated to educating North Koreans.

In the film, Smith “continually emphasizes how he bribed his way in. To me it sounds very much like paying a visa fee,” said Abrahamian, who wrote a lengthy article debunking many of the claims Smith makes in the first North Korea film.

Abrahamian also challenged Smith’s account of the country’s Mass Games athletic spectacle, which Smith describes as “the most insane thing you’ve ever seen in your life.” Abrahamian wrote of Smith’s description:

In what appears to be a curious lie, in an intro-article hosted on VBS and CNN, Smith claims that “the fifteen of us who made up the audience watched from a marble dais. We were the only spectators.” Yet two shots show thousands of other audience members (pt. 3, 12, 14 mins). Did he mean fifteen foreigners? Or fifteen people in the most expensive section, where Kim Jong-Il and Madeline Albright watched the games together?

“[Smith] sounds like an incredible bad-ass, fighting the man at every turn. [But] he comes across as kind of a chump. He paid for a tour that thousands of people go on,” said Abrahamian, who sees Smith’s whole trip as part of his general “hyperbole and self-aggrandizement.”

“[North Korea] is a strange culture, so he can get away with it. It suits his vision of himself,” Abrahamian said.

“It’s easy to see why Shane loves North Korea,” said a former employee. “He’s a cult leader who has built a Potemkin village where everything is smoke and mirrors.”

Smith’s integrity issues have extended to his personal life, as well.

He told an artist ex-girlfriend at her gallery opening that he was dying of a mystery illness and maintained the story for over a year.

“He would repeatedly tell her that any level of stress could kill him,” says a former VICE employee. “He kept using the phrase ‘doctor’s order’ to excuse whatever he was doing, like taking phone calls, or spending time with her would kill him. In reality, he was messing around.”

Reached for comment, the ex-girlfriend, who asked not to be named, confirmed the story and said that she eventually found out through social media that Smith was seeing other women when he said he was going to the doctor’s office.

Smith told Charlie Rose that he ran away from home at age 13 — instead, he moved in with his father after getting into a fight with his step dad, say longtime friends who knew him at the time. He also told Rose that his father “built an electric car that won the first—one of the first electric car races,” but that, too, wasn’t true. The first electric car races were decades earlier and in the United States, not Smith’s native Canada.

A Canadian journalist, who also asked not to be identified, described Smith telling her that he had been in a gang in his teenage years, which she later discovered from interviewing family and friends, was “bogus.” The piece she was working on was published, but didn’t include anything about Smith’s childhood.

Childhood friend Bannister describes Smith as prone to “exaggeration.”

“He is the type of guy, you will do something together and he will be telling someone a story about what you guys did. It will always sound far more exciting than what actually happened,” said Bannister in an interview with TheDC.

“It’s not that he’s making things up. He’s a great storyteller,” Bannister said. “The mystique is built into his character.”

VICE co-founder Gavin McInnes, who declined to be interviewed for this article, once referred to his ex-partner as “Bullshitter Shane.” The two split over “creative differences” in 2004 and some perceived racially-insensitive comments from McInnes which appeared in the New York Times.

Smith often exaggerates about the size and success of VICE, according to former employees.

When the first of the company’s profile pieces came out saying how much money VICE was making, Smith was worried that the employees — many of whom work below market rate — would be upset, said a former employee. “He told us that there’s always a difference between perception and reality and that that was important to help VICE grow,” the employee said.

Smith has routinely inflated the number of people who work for him internationally. He boasted to the Financial Times in December that the network has over “800 employees in 34 countries” and, according to one former VICE employee, “this figure is ridiculously false.” VICE told the Globe and Mail in May that it has “more than 1,100 employees across the globe.”

“We sabotaged every interview with bullshit,” wrote McInnes in his 2012 memoir, “How to Piss in Public: From Teenage Rebellion to the Hangover of Adulthood.” “When asked about Vice’s future, Shane told the reporter we had just been bought by local dot-com billionaire Richard Szalwinski.” The New York Times fell for it, reporting that business deal faithfully in 2007.

“We didn’t think anything of this stupid lie,” McInnes recalls, since “it was just one of many, but a few hours after the article was published, we met the man himself.”

Szalwinski, impressed by their bravado — the story goes — bought a 25 percent stake of VICE for a supposed million dollars and things started going well. But Wired Magazine reported in 2007 that “Szalwinski doesn’t remember reading the article before giving them money. Oh, and the actual amount? More like a few hundred thousand, he says.”

Smith repeatedly called up friends in those days and screamed into the receiver “We’re going to be rich,” over and over again, say friends from the period.

But now, VICE insiders paint a picture of amateurishness.

“It is amateur hour over there. They are amateur people trying to portray themselves to others as news people,” said a former employee. “They always hype everything. It’s always ‘Holy shit. Everything is so crazy. You have to punch everything up.’”

Last December, VICE posted a photograph of editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro with fugitive John McAfee with the Exif metadata — longitudinal coordinates — that revealed McAfee’s location and led to his arrest in Guatemala.

Rather than fess up to having gotten their source arrested, VICE photographer Robert King claimed on his Facebook page and Twitter that he had altered the metadata when he hadn’t, essentially covering for a man wanted on murder charges.

A few journalists ran stories mocking VICE — “Dear Journalists at Vice and Elsewhere, Here Are Some Simple Ways Not To Get Your Source Arrested” read one headline from Forbes.

But Smith’s most recent run-in with the truth may be among the most glaring of his career.

During his May 24, 2013 interview with Charlie Rose, Smith revealed that VICE had conducted an interview with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, to be shown during the HBO series.

“Well, we have the interview,” Smith told Rose. “You have the interview?” Rose responded, surprised. “Yes,” Smith repeated, “we show him in the documentary.”

“[I] didn’t realize you guys had an interview of some substance,” Rose said.

“Yes we — we — we talked to him and we — there are a bunch of people who talked to him,” Smith insisted.

The season finale aired weeks ago. The Kim Jong Un interview — or even a characterization of that interview — never aired.

The show’s been renewed for a second season.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/03/vice- ... s/?print=1
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Wed Nov 22, 2017 6:08 pm

Vice Enlists Gloria Steinem for Female-Led Advisory Board Amid Harassment Claims
11:40 AM PST 11/17/2017 by Natalie Jarvey

The media company held a staff meeting Friday in which it laid out the steps it is taking to improve workplace culture.

Vice Media held a meeting with staff Friday morning in which it laid out steps it is taking to foster a more inclusive culture, including creating a female-led advisory committee that will be tasked with setting up new practices within the media company.

The meeting, which a Vice spokesman confirmed, comes two days after Vice announced that it was opening up an internal investigation in response to a Daily Beast article [2] that described a toxic work environment for women. In the article, a former producer in the company’s L.A. office accused two managers of sexual harassment and said that human resources did not take steps to address the situation. The article also pointed to Vice's "nontraditional workplace agreement" — in which employees agree that they will not be offended by exposure to sexually provocative or explicit media — as helping to foster such behavior.

Vice is among many media and entertainment companies that have faced increased scrutiny about how they handle harassment against their employees in the weeks since several women accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault. Sources inside Vice say that the efforts laid out in the staff meeting were in the works prior to the Daily Beast article’s publication.

During the staff gathering, Vice aired a video in which employees in the U.S. and abroad discussed changes the company could make and things it could improve upon.

Among the efforts Vice announced Friday was the creation of an advisory committee chaired by attorney Roberta Kaplan, who argued against the Defense of Marriage Act before the Supreme Court. Other members of the committee include former Vice COO Alyssa Mastromonaco, who now serves as president of global communications strategy and talent at Vice investor A+E; Gloria Steinem, whose Woman series on Viceland was nominated for an Emmy in 2016; former Michelle Obama chief of staff Tina Tchen; a former senior policy adviser to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, Maya Harris; Vice's new global chief human resources officer, Susan Tohyama; and Broadly publisher Ariel Wengroff, who will serve as board secretary. They will work with Vice executives and decision makers to improve company policies and procedures and make recommendations on workplace changes that Vice can make.

The committee is reporting into Vice's executive team and board, which this year added former MTV chairman Judy McGrath to its ranks. A+E CEO Nancy Dubuc also sits on the board.

Further, Vice announced that it has promoted Sarah Broderick to chief operating officer, in addition to her current role as chief financial officer. Broderick, who sits on the Vice board and will also serve on the advisory committee, is looking to streamline operations at Vice, including making changes to workplace policies.

Other recent changes that it highlighted at the meeting include its plan to offer pay parity for all employees by the end of 2018 and the establishment of an employee hotline that will allow anyone at the company to anonymously report problems, including sexual harassment.

Founded in 1994 as a punk magazine, Vice has long been known for its male-centric point of view and alternative workplace culture. Much of that environment is seen as stemming from CEO Shane Smith, who enjoys talking up his extravagant lifestyle and is known to swear heavily in interviews. Under Smith’s leadership, Vice has expanded significantly into television — with several HBO shows and A+E run cable network Viceland — as well into new coverage areas, including sports, news, music and women's issues. The company, which operates in 40 countries and works with thousands of journalists and producers, has raised over $1 billion from Disney, 21st Century Fox and TPG.

But even as Vice has grown, it has remained committed to its image as an edgy, millennial media organization. The Daily Beast report, for which it interviewed more than a dozen current and former Vice employees, looked at how that culture had impacted its female employees. It focused on the story of producer Phoebe Barghouty, who alleged that former L.A. bureau chief Kaj Larsen made sexual comments to her and touched her inappropriately at work. Barghouty, who left the company in 2016, also described comments made by then editor-in-chief Jason Mojica, and said that HR did nothing when she told them about the incidents involving Larsen.

The Vice Union responded to the allegations with a statement in which it said, "We have been vocal in our concerns about gender equity and ensuring our workplace is an environment in which everyone feels safe, respected, and valued, and will continue to demand that the company recognize and respond to these concerns in full."

Vice has suspended Mojica [3], who has been running its documentary film division since August of last year, as part of its investigation into the Daily Beast allegations.
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby Elvis » Wed Nov 22, 2017 7:48 pm

Smith repeatedly called up friends in those days and screamed into the receiver “We’re going to be rich,” over and over again


Explains a lot.
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Sat Dec 23, 2017 3:21 pm

At Vice, Cutting-Edge Media and Allegations of Old-School Sexual Harassment
A media company built on subversion and outlandishness was unable to create “a safe and inclusive workplace” for women, two of its founders acknowledge.
By EMILY STEELDEC. 23, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/busi ... sment.html
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Re: VICE as RI subject

Postby Jerky » Sun Dec 24, 2017 9:12 am

In my former business life I worked with people who were tight with Gavin and pals, and from what I've been told, that whole crew were a bunch of debauched, nihilistic, drug-addled faux-punk Anglo Montrealer scumbag sacks of shit.

Also, Gavin has apparently always been a Nazi, despite his lust for minority-hued womanflesh. it's just that he used to do a better job of convincing people he was joking.

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