Aaron Maté alerts us to this sneaky piece of anti-Chavista propaganda:
Watch this weird & I think irresponsible @vicenews coverage of the Venezuelan embassy standoff. Vice suggests "creepy" @CodePink "pros" have endangered pro-coup supporters by releasing their info online -- but show no evidence for that or attempt to verify if it's actually true: pic.twitter.com/06wGxIy6o2
Do note how the dispatch is a masterpiece of faux "balanced reporting", essentially giving the coup supporters equal standing to the legitimate government side, while using subtle (but effective) innuendo to besmirch the image of CodePink. This is what "coporate journalism", itself an oxymoron excel at. Fact is, VICE MEDIA is just a brand, another capitalist commodity, to be seen and played to maximise profits, while defeating via rank and expert disinformation anyone who might want to change that nifty system. See the company profile in our special appendix below. —Editor
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) May 11, 2019
And this, a longer version:
Published on 10 May 2019
APPENDIX
Check out this piece on the South China Morning Post describing the meteoric rise of VICE MEDIA. But that was 18 months ago. The good news (for us) is that Disney, one of the ugly hydras in the US media oligopoly, has now taken a beating with its investment in this company. And things may yet get worse. See below.
FIRST, THE UPBEAT STORY: On the South China Morning Post
How Vice Media went from start-up to US$5.7 billion global behemoth – it’s not all been smooth sailing
Hong Kong-born Tom Punch, the company’s chief creative officer, ponders how Vice can remain a ‘challenger brand’ having gone from a staff of 80 when he joined in 2012 to 3,000 globally now, as it looks to expand its Asia presence
Paul Kay
The clearly admiring caption reads: "Vice Media is estimated to be worth US$5.7 billion. Not bad for a company that started in 1994 as a magazine." Yea, let's rah rah capitalist "journalism".
Published: 8:00pm, 4 Apr, 2018
The company that redefined current affairs for the millennial generation, Vice Media, is one of the most successful – and controversial – media brands to emerge in the past 25 years.
Founded in Montreal, Canada, in 1994, and known for producing youth-oriented content with a provocative edge, Vice has grown from local counterculture magazine to US$5.7 billion multi-platform global media enterprise in less time than much of its current audience have been alive.
Based in New York – in the hipster stronghold of Williamsburg in Brooklyn – since 2001, Vice’s growth over the past six years has been nothing short of stratospheric, a rise that has coincided with the tenure of Hong Kong-born Tom Punch, the company’s chief commercial and creative officer who is responsible for “bridging the worlds of content and commerce and revenue”.
READ MORE
THEN, THE DOWNBEAT STORY: On the Drum.com
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Disney takes $353m Vice Media hit as publisher struggles for profitability
Disney has written off a further $353m from its disastrous Vice Media investment as the publisher struggles to maintain profitability amid a highly competitive online advertising market.
The mammoth writedown follows a $157m devaluation recorded in November as the entertainment giant concedes that it is unlikely to make a return on its $400m investment in the publisher to secure a 21% stake.
Back in 2017, Vice was valued at $5.7bn on the back of a sprawling media empire dedicated to alternative culture which spawned its own TV shows and Viceland cable channel.
A combination of poor ratings and a dearth of digital advertising have served to undermine this business model, with a resultant downward trajectory in its valuation hitting investors hard.
This is an article from our series on septic media
Closing words
Like vampires fearing light, capitalists elites have always been afraid of the socialist demonstration effect. A huge and constant effort is aimed at "showing" that socialism doesn't work, that it is tyrannical, inefficient, etc. Thus sabotaging and killing socialism wherever it may arise —Russia, China, Korea, Venezuela, Chile—by any means necessary, no matter how brutal and dishonest, is therefore standing policy. But socialist solutions work. And Medicare for All would show everyone in America, the key capitalist fortress, that many of our nightmares can easily vanish under socialism. For the capitalists and their hanger-ons it would be a Pandora's box.—P. Greanville
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
