VICE Co-Founder Admits Woke Journalism Destroyed Brand: ‘What The F**k Is This?’

VICE co-founder Shane Smith admitted in an interview with legendary music producer and ‘Tetragrammaton’ host Rick Rubin that his the once-high flying digital media empire–once valued at $5.7 billion – collapsed partly due to leaning heavily into “woke” content.

RICK RUBIN: Is there any point in the VICE story where you feel like VICE sold out?

SHANE SMITH: I wouldn’t necessarily say sold out because we were always independent, we always sold pieces of it.

RICK RUBIN: But from a content perspective, did you ever pander your content away from what you actually liked?

SHANE SMITH: The problem with content, and what people don’t understand, is the same thing with TV: people don’t put content on that they like because they like it; they put content on that rates. So, to go back to around 2017, at the peak of the HBO era – because all of our big clients, like Google and the studios, and everybody was out in LA. I moved to LA and so I sort of stepped back from day-to-day but I kept doing news. And VICE – the other channels, not the news, and VICE started moving – ‘cause we always say ‘give the company over to the interns,’ like every five years. And VICE started moving into this sort of weird woke era or whatever. But it was young people writing for themselves for the audience. It was like our audience went from Millennials to whatever that is – Gen Z – and they were writing for themselves, to themselves. By the way, traffic was through the roof, but the old VICE audience, including me, was like, “What are we doing here?”

And also, one of the mistakes was that VICE News was over here, which I was concentrating on, and it was still killing it and doing awards and all that stuff, but people didn’t differentiate between VICE.com and VICE News. There was just VICE, and so I think that was a f**k up. We should have had a lot more differentiation. I mean, the “go woke, go broke” thing, I’m well aware of, and a lot of times I’d see stuff and you would be like, “what the fuck?” Then you go to give someone shit, and they’re like, “Okay, this is the one you liked; 10 people saw the one that this other piece got 100 million, that’s just what fuckin’ young people want, you old man.” And you’re like, “Oh, well.” It’s a problem with digital media, in that it changes with the audience. The audience now, that young digital-consuming audience, is that audience, and that’s the content they want.

So, it became problematic. And definitely, should be speaking of selling out, like Disney or any of those corporate partners, they didn’t want that; we didn’t want that. It was just sort of this… you know, we had, I don’t know, 5,000 employees doing 7,000 pieces a day, and all of this stuff would come out and you’d be like, “What the fuck is this this?” Did we lose control of the bicycle? Yeah.