“Vice” and how the world saw it
Photo: SWR/ARD Kultur/Beetz Brothers
The king’s new clothes sometimes turn people into something completely different than what is behind them. For example, anyone who portrays Gavin McInnes in an ARD documentary with the strangely alliterative subtitle “Gosse. Gonzo. Megalomania, suspects all sorts of things: A banker whose sense of style hasn’t been ruined by all that money? A hipster who’s a little too meticulous about elegant eccentricity? A boomer who, in the madness of youth, is increasingly fighting doggedly for interpretative sovereignty? Everything is conceivable. But a misogynistic Holocaust denier with his own Nazi brigade?
At the beginning of the ARD three-part series “The Vice Story,” McInnes would probably hardly expect anyone to be behind the co-founder of the most sensational lifestyle magazine of our era. The fact that this charming loudmouth ultimately turns out to be the head of the martial Trump comradeship Proud Boys somehow fits with a radical magazine that he founded exactly 30 years ago with Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith in Montreal. “A hipster, a hacker, a rip-off,” says McInnes, describing his trio before their departure into new times, which was followed by an unparalleled decline.
“A hipster, a hacker, a rip-off,” says McInnes, describing his trio before their departure into new times, which was followed by an unparalleled decline.
After a few thousand years of war, humanity finally seemed to be on the way to peace in 1994 and wanted one thing above all: unconditional fun. Suddenly escapism was no longer a blind retreat from the present, but rather a cheerful turn to the future. And the “Vice” drove the journalistic getaway vehicle. Based on “New Journalism,” when pop writers like Hunter S. Thompson looked at the 70s from a personal perspective and thus freed reporting from the corset of neutral objectivity, “Vice” led to the anarchy of unconditional closeness.
From then on, when their reporters talked about extreme sports and war crimes, drug cartels or arms dealers, techno raves and similar exceptional situations, they were usually right in the middle of it, rather than just there. What’s more: quite a few of them were actively staged, provoked and constructed; a professionally disreputable, economically lucrative revenue concept that turned the magazine into a brand, the brand into an end in itself, the end in itself into a brand and all over again. Because “Vice,” English for “vice,” was free around the world, its main source of income was advertising.
As its appeal grew, however, the content became part of PR and vice versa – also known as “advertorial”. Or as Christoph Voy, the first “Vice” photographer in this country, puts it for the overall concept: “A fuck-it mentality like in punk, but very ambitious.” Too bad that this ambition soon focused on bank statements instead of content and Attention was given greater weight than the claim to interactively pulverize the avant-garde gatekeeper function of classical media.
No wonder that “Vice” used the newspaper crisis after the dot-com bubble burst in 2002 to switch from patient paper to hasty videos. But this didn’t just destroy the last remnants of journalistic care. “Vice” also anticipated the resonance spaces of social media, including their brutalization into bubbles of today’s hate bubbles. Anyone who listens to those involved in those eventful years in the ARD media library, from former reporter Thilo Mischke to text boss Sara Schurmann, will feel the mixture of sadness and horror at the slide of their journalistic home into the abyss of agenda capitalism.
Ultimately, parallel to the PR fixation, there were not only editorial #MeToo scandals; To prevent the excitement curve from flattening, the “Vice” willingly went on a manhunt with Islamists, wooed diabolical dictators and ultimately ended up with Saudi Arabian sponsors. This makes »The Vice Story« strikingly similar to the fabulous »Viva-Story« in the same place that dismantled, or rather had to dismantle, the similarly old, equally miserably failed music station last summer with a three-part documentary.
Because both wanted to translate the hedonism of the post-heroic 90s into pop cultural freedom. However, both of them confused this freedom to break the rules with the freedom to enrich themselves and quite rightly hit the wall. That’s what “gutter is like.” Gonzo. Megalomania” is just another brand that the market economy is branding on its media industry to show who determines the rise and fall. In any case, they are only visionaries when they become megalomaniacs like Shane Smith, Trump fans like Gavin McInnes – or, as in the case of “Vice”, both.
»The Vice Story – Gutter. Gonzo. Megalomania” can be seen in the ARD media library.
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