Vice

There is a recurring type of incident that reflects the insularity of today’s media class: “Everyone was talking about it, but no one reported it.” There is no stronger indictment of contemporary media bias — it doesn’t arise just out of partisanship, nor out of opposition to reporting stories that displease our ruling class. It reaches the point of actively lying and covering up things any average American knows to be true. The most prominent recent example is found in the reaction to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s findings regarding Joe Biden’s hoarding of classified documents.

Their declared intention was to break the internet. In November 2014, the winter issue of Paper magazine, a stalwart of the New York arts and music scene for thirty years, featured an image immediately declared iconic by social media: Kim Kardashian, her neck wrapped in pearls, popping a Champagne cork and catching the bubbly white stream that jets over her head in the coupe glass propped on her prominent derrière. And that was just the cover — the internet quickly shared photographer Jean-Paul Goude’s more pornographic images of an oiled-up Kardashian stripping out of her black evening gown to show off her famous buttocks, before going full frontal with a slightly unnerving smile. The gambit worked to the tune of 16 million views for Paper in a single week.

Last week I was at a writers' party in Miami, a city at the cutting edge of tech, finance, the creator economy and nightlife. Naturally the writers were talking about themselves. I asked someone what he would do if he didn’t have to worry about pageviews or proprietors or the other pressing concerns of the modern media. “Think VICE, when it was good,” he replied. To me, VICE when it was good is the girl’s bum on the fiction issue from 2008. It’s Michael Moynihan’s raspy voice reporting from South Korea. It’s the floppy hair of the one super-hot reporter I knew that smoked filterless roll-ups. VICE was where the cool kids at the back of the bus would grow up to write, the place that you would daydream about working for as a young reporter.

It's no secret that mainstream journalism awards have gone to the dogs. The Washington Post and the New York Times both received Pulitzer Prizes for their "reporting" on Russiagate, for example, though their stories desperately hinted at a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia that didn't actually exist. The NYT's Nikole Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer for the widely debunked 1619 Project. The Walter Cronkite Award has previously been given to NBC News's Chuck Todd for excluding so-called "climate deniers" from his broadcasts, a CNN journalist who described the 2020 riots in Kenosha as "fiery but mostly peaceful" was nominated for an Emmy, and the New York Press bestowed CNN's Jim Acosta with a "Truth to Power" award.

It's been a bad couple of years for Jeffreys... Veteran New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended from the magazine after he 'exposed himself during a Zoom call last week', according to VICE. Toobin, who also serves as a CNN legal analyst, must have been reaching for the tissues as he described the incident as an 'embarrassingly stupid mistake' and offered an apology to his 'wife, family, friends and co-workers' in a statement. Cockburn is perhaps most surprised that Toobin is the first significant figure to be caught out during a video-conference, seven months into the COVID pandemic. What took us? Naturally, Twitter users have been having a field day with the story: https://twitter.com/rysimmons/status/1318266346610765829 https://twitter.

Ever since being beaten and robbed by Antifa in Portland in June, I have continued to receive threats of violence, which have prompted attention from police. But the scale of the abuse I received on Tuesday morning after waking up was unprecedented. The source of the rage? A Daily Beast hit piece headlined, 'Right-wing star Andy Ngo exits Quillette after damning video surfaces.' This was followed by another story in the Washington Examiner, shared in a tweet, which said I was out at Quillette 'after controversial video surfaces showing him doing nothing to stop or report violent attack.' This was followed by more hit pieces on VICE and Media Matters.