How ‘Vice’ Went from a $6 Billion Media Empire to Bankruptcy

Honestly with Bari Weiss

The Free Press

Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 7.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Fifteen years ago, Vice was the envy of the media industry. While other outlets were shrinking, the edgy multimedia organization with a knack for virality was growing. At its peak, Vice had a reported value of $6 billion. At one point, Disney offered to buy the company for $3.4 billion. The CEO said no. Something even bigger was on the horizon. Except. . . it never came. No one else approached with another offer and the company started to collapse. Last year, Vice filed for bankruptcy. The media narrative of what happened at Vice was that they simply made a series of business mistakes and the economic model of the business crumbled. But Michael Moynihan says that’s not the whole story. Michael—who Honestly listeners know as a frequent guest host here—is a longtime journalist who spent a decade at Vice. He was a correspondent for Vice’s flagship series on HBO. Today, he published a revealing insider story in The Free Press about how Vice really lost its way. Spoiler: apologizing for the gonzo journalism that fueled the business to begin with, and caving to an identity politics–obsessed staff of twentysomethings, isn’t exactly a recipe for success. Vice didn’t just bleed cash. It also bled its backbone and its ethos. And the thing that replaced it? Well, no one wanted to consume it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	At Barclays, we're here for every goal.
0:06.4	We're here for the Premier League,
0:09.0	and the Barclays Women's Super League.
0:12.0	We're here for the football chance for giving more girls a chance.
0:18.0	We're here for the grassroots and all the muddy boots. From schools to stadiums, we're here for it all.
0:27.6	Barclays, here for every goal.
0:30.8	From the free press, this is honestly honestly and I'm Barry Weiss.
0:36.0	My guest today is someone you know and I hope love my friend Michael Moynihan.
0:41.0	He's guest hosted
0:42.8	honestly many times before and you're going to continue to hear him on the
0:45.9	show in the coming months which I'm really excited about. Michael is a
0:50.3	veteran journalist. He's a former national correspondent for Vice HBO and Vice News
0:55.8	tonight. He's also had stints at The Daily Beast. We try not to hold that against him.
1:00.0	And before that was a senior editor at Reason magazine.
1:02.8	You've also probably seen his writing in tablet, where I used to edit him,
1:06.9	the L.A. Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post,
1:09.2	political newsweek, even some Swedish publications that I cannot pronounce.
1:13.4	And while Michael is used to being the one interviewing, today I'm going to put him in the
1:17.6	hot seat.
1:18.6	And that's because Michael just published a very important and revealing story in the free press. It's about Vice and the
1:25.9	years that he spent as a journalist working there, but the reason I think this story
1:30.2	is so important and the reason we're devoting an episode to it today is not
	...

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