Maybe it was Shane Smith‘s captivating Canadian voice, the young journalists or the fact that I could pick up a free Vice mag around Sydney (back in the day) that has had me hooked on Vice for eons. This was the first news source that I gravitated toward once I realised there was a world out there and that Dolly magazine was stupid. ‘A definitive guide to everything’, certainly sums up Vice’s broad content matter and global reach, heck maybe all those foreign stories and exotic locations propelled me to move abroad nearly a decade ago.

The Vice voice has always resonated with me and whilst I was living in Canada, I felt like a had an ally for a news source, informing me of the turmoil and the pseudo mad hatters tea party drama that was constantly unfolding for my southern neighbours. News from Vice feels fluid, informative and neutral, their plethora of free lance journalists and foreign correspondents shining light on matters that interested me like China’s scary surveillance or the enduring war in Syria. Like any other media source these days, Vice has presence on socials, Youtube, a TV channel and online mag.

Anyone else remember the birth of the internet? It’s so common place these days but I can recall the exact tune of the dial up tone, creepy. The wild world web galloped onto the stage in the late nineties giving a voice to the common person and this new 2D platform for media to spread it wings. Early on the in the piece the internet wasn’t taken too seriously by the media and this meant that news content was uploaded for free, which of course signalled the slow demise of Printed papers and magazines, cue violin noises.

The media tendrils had penetrated the web, rapidly expanding its consumption but in Australia this led to a concentration in ownership. In a nutshell Journalism is costly, and with the utter prevalence of free press, the many voices of the news began to shrink as only the bigger conglomerates could afford advertising and to stand out in a sea of competing voices, a lot of them not so verifiable. This led to Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, ruling the roost here in Australia and his biased tone echoing through his publications, ‘the risk is greater for partisan ideological divides to form in society when fuelled by media outlets that have made it part of their business model to publish heavily opinionated content instead of striving for compromise via respectful democratic behaviour‘ (Lidberg, 2019).

Australia has always felt a little conservative to me and it has been interesting to see the comparison of news delivery here to Canada and the many nuances, I’m still sifting through the local news voices here to see what I can anchor to. Vice has certainly evolved from its punk, counter culture beginnings, to a more reverent, thoughtful tone but who actually owns Vice media now? Originally Co founded by Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi in 1994, it has grown considerably since then. Smith had created an empire and there were plenty of players wanting to jump on this pony including A&E and The Walt Disney company when he wanted out. The Texas group (an investment firm) holds forty four percent of the stakes and interestingly James Murdoch has snuck a slither of the pie, which irks me.

In my avid ingestion of Vice media, I have not noticed that this ownership plays any part in shaping its content or voice mostly due to the input of multiple free lance journalists and a broad audience to engage. I applaud Vice for the scope of voices on its platform including a citizen journalist that blogged for seven years from Syria and the Informer channel on Youtube interviewing regular citizens in an Anonymous style. And if the world is too woeful, Vice throws in plenty of scapegoats like Action Bronson to lull our tastebuds in ‘Fuck that’s Delicious.’

What’s your Vice?

References:

Lidberg, J, 2019, The distortion of the public sphere: Media ownership concentration in Australia, Vol 90, Issue 1.