11/23/2023 0 Comments Vice media controversyIn June, the company had conducted an internal survey in which one of the top issues flagged by employees was a lack of diversity in management. ![]() Workplace concerns were on management’s radar by last summer. Its new bread and butter was documentary-style hard-news reporting for the post-MTV generation, as epitomized by Vice’s HBO shows, in which young, hip-looking correspondents would embed with, say, Iraqi forces battling ISIS, or a repugnant crew of white nationalists marching in Charlottesville, a video that has been viewed more than 50 million times since it first went viral in August. Content-wise, Vice had for several years been moving away from the raunchy, shock-value reputation that long defined the brand. Vice’s advantage in the #MeToo moment was that even before the fall of Weinstein, it knew it had a culture problem-a clear and present danger to its valuation-and it had already taken some steps toward fixing it. ( Gavin McInnes, another founder and Smith‘s childhood pal, who left the company in 2008 over “creative differences,” went on to become leader of the Proud Boys, a far-right men’s-movement group that bills itself as a “pro-Western fraternal organization.”) As former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who is working on a book about four media companies including Vice, told me, “The great, white whale of the story was always Shane.” We even got some orgies out of it.” Such men made inviting targets. In a 2003 book, the site’s founders had boasted about using the magazine “as a way to get laid. “It’s like a big high school in Williamsburg,” said an insider.Įven outside the company, gossips were wondering whether the story would bring down Shane Smith, one in a trio of founders who had spent more than two decades transforming Vice from an irreverent, testosterone-drenched cool-kid magazine into a global youth-media juggernaut that legacy titans including Viacom, Disney, and 21st Century Fox were all dying to get a piece of. There were whispery accounts of sources misrepresenting themselves as working on behalf of the Times, the goal being to record interviews with other sources and pass along the goods. “Every day you think, ‘Is this the day that it’s going to break?,’” one Vice employee told HuffPost, while the Awl sniffed, “Tick fuckin’ tock.” A reporter for the Daily Beast presaged the eventual Times feature with a much less extensive, but still damaging report, in which a mid-twentysomething female former Vice producer described, on the record, “a toxic environment, where men could be abusive, and some women were manipulated into thinking that acquiescing to that abuse was the only way to advance.”Īll manner of accusations were flying around, some clearly within the realm of possibility (rampant sexual harassment, unwanted come-ons, etc.), others more fantastical (Vice was covering up a murder in Europe). ![]() ![]() Rumors about the impending impact grew and grew, to the degree that the speculation became a news story itself. #MeToo journalism was almost daily crushing illustrious careers- Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Al Franken, Mario Batali-but with Vice, the Times story threatened to crater the company’s outlandish $5.7 billion valuation. An asteroid was heading toward Vice’s emerald city of millennials. “Let’s stay close on it,” he said, according to someone who knows how the conversation went down. Plepler made it clear that HBO expected to be kept closely abreast of any and all developments, and also about what Vice was doing to hold itself accountable. Richard Plepler himself brought it up with Josh Tyrangiel-whom Vice had hired at Plepler’s suggestion in 2015 to oversee the HBO shows-during a meeting in Plepler’s office. HBO executives wanted to know what the hell was going on, so they began reaching out to their Vice counterparts. Word on the street was that the Times had a Vice bombshell on its hands, and HBO, which had partnered with Vice on a pair of news shows, was worried. The fallout from Harvey Weinstein’s stunning downfall at the hands of The New York Times and The New Yorker was still fresh, and there was a mounting roster of similar inquests into the sexual transgressions of other men in media, entertainment, and politics. ![]() It was mid-autumn, around the same time the #MeToo movement was metastasizing into a worldwide cultural phenomenon, when HBO brass began catching wind of the rumors.
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