How Identity Politics (and Cowardice) Killed 'Vice' Magazine

If you’re trying to understand why legacy media is collapsing—and is being replaced by organizations like The Free Press—the downfall of Vice is a helpful case study.

I am currently listening to Bari Weiss interviewing Michael Moynihan on a Free Press podcast. It’s an amazing discussion, and it explores the downfall of Vice magazine, which went from a $6 billion valuation to bankruptcy court in seemingly the blink of an eye.

It’s a story many of us have heard, but few know the details about. Moynihan, however, does know the details. A longtime journalist, he hung his hat at Vice, where he was briefly managing editor.

While many connect the downfall with Vice with 2017 accusations that it had become a frat house of “old school sexual harassment,” Moynihan argues the story is more complicated.

In his interview with Weiss, he makes it clear that the Vice’s content had become, well, bad. (Yes, the product you’re selling actually matters.) Moreover, he explains that the newsroom had become dominated by a kind of woke zealotry among employees.

If you think I’m exaggerating by using the word zealotry, consider this anecdote, which describes when Vice employees demanded that the magazine covers (which dated back to the magazine’s founding in 1994) that adorned the office be stripped down because they were too offensive.

The walls of Vice’s sprawling Brooklyn headquarters were lined with magazine covers charting the company’s transformation from insouciant Canadian post-punk magazine to money-printing media colossus. In early 2018, long before college students discovered that dispatching problematic statues into canals would be reliably met with institutional approval, a group of employees demanded that the covers be removed from the walls.

Not a specific cover. All of them.

Vice employees were demanding that leaders remove magazine covers they found too controversial to their delicate sentiments. That employees would make such demands of the company paying their salaries is shocking. What’s more shocking is that leaders at Vice conceded to the demand!

“The covers were swiftly removed, now sequestered in co-founder Suroosh Alvi’s basement office, where a number of longtime Vice employees gathered to express a collective incredulity.

“The resistance starts now,” one of them said hopefully. But we all saw it for what it was: a surrender.

It was the first in a cascading series of I told you so moments.

Moynihan was right to say “I told you so.” What followed was a string of even more ludicrous demands, which included putting blasphemous content down the Memory Hole.

“While you couldn’t unpublish old issues of the magazine, you could, it turned out, appoint a detachment of digital commissars, tasked with removing ideological deviations from the online archives. 

Browse old Vice articles on the website and you’ll periodically come across stories that have been discreetly memory-holed, replaced with this rather bloodless verdict: “We have concluded that this article does not meet Vice Media Group’s editorial standards. It has been removed.”

All of this airbrushing of the past for the sake of psychological safety in the present was a harbinger of the grimness to come, partly because it provoked no audible internal dissent and went unnoticed by the outside world.”

Vice employees might be political fanatics, but they hardly deserve all the blame. The leaders who caved also deserve plenty (and our scorn), perhaps even more than the reporters. By displaying total cowardice before these angry children, leaders effectively put the lunatics in charge of the asylum.

The result? A $6 billion media empire was reduced to rubble.

If you’re trying to understand why legacy media is collapsing—and is being replaced by organizations like The Free Press—the downfall of Vice is a helpful case study.