By next week, Vice will have had more sit-downs with @POTUS than __ mainstream outlets? https://t.co/eZjMYW3URg
— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) July 10, 2015
Hand to goddess, I saved this tweet over the weekend, long before DougJ’s latest post. From the VICE article:
… As part of the VICE special airing this fall on HBO, Obama and VICE founder Shane Smith, host of the special, will tour the facility and meet with prisoners, prison staff, and law enforcement officials…
The interviews will be part of a documentary looking at the pervasive impacts of America’s approach to crime and imprisonment. The special is the latest in VICE’s ongoing coverage of what has become a major civil rights and reform agenda in the United States…
As we are happily aware, President Obama takes his message where voters will hear it, even to places that aren’t Very Serious Media-Village Approved outlets. Seems like Shane Smith may have an understanding of some portion of the media-consuming public, even if that portion’s motivations are entirely opaque to us older, wiser readers… and it’s not as though Zeke Miller’s beloved sercon Outlets of Record has really done much to earn the President’s exclusive loyalty, have they?
Baud
What’s the word for when you first learn of a thing (like VICE) and then suddenly see it everywhere?
Karen in GA
Maybe it’s me, but I don’t recall a President so driven to actually confront and solve real problems — wait, no, I’m wrong. Bush the Lesser wanted to confront and solve real problems too, it’s just that their definition of “problems” included “peace,” “renewable energy,” and “the middle class.” Never mind.
Anyway, open thread, so here’s Iggy, photogenic.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
ETA: Synchroncity is a somewhat similar concept. And a Police album.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
So two (or three words). I’ll never remember that.
jl
I think there may be confusion between VICE magazine and VICE News. I’ve known about VICE News for some time, and they seem to do responsible straight reporting, though haven’t seen enough of it to know for sure. I first heard of VICE magazine in DougJ’s post below, and it seems to be a very different beast. Owned by the same parent company though. But I think independent of each other otherwise.
I am pretty sure I read Shane Smith was in on beginning of VICE News, I never heard he was founder of magazine or parent corporation, but I could be wrong.
srv
@Omnes Omnibus: No, that’s a band. I think it’s a Darude Sandstorm.
Southern Goth
@Baud:
Don’t worry. Now you’re going to see it everywhere.
Omnes Omnibus
@srv: No, that’s a Finnish symbolist poet.
Elizabelle
@Karen in GA: He is so cute. Laughing, too.
Baud
@Southern Goth: Ha!
jl
Vice News
” In December of 2013 Vice Media expanded their international news division into an independent division dedicated to news exclusively and created VICE News. Vice Media put $50 million into their news division which now has 34 bureaus worldwide and has been praised for in depth coverage of international news ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_News
Karen in GA
@Omnes Omnibus: no, you’re thinking of Pomppufiilis.
Glad to help.
Omnes Omnibus
@Karen in GA: I am afraid to go to sleep now.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
Only one of the current candidates would do this.
Karen in GA
@Elizabelle: He’s a photogenic little beast. And he often likes hugs, which I understand is unusual for a dog. Greatest dog in the universe, as far as I’m concerned.
Muppet, OTOH, is the greatest cat-ferret-baby deer-bird-and-a-little-bit-of-dog hybrid in the universe.
Smiling Mortician
@Baud: For me it was pregnancy. YMMV.
srv
I just can’t get enough of this guy. Am going to drink, put some Baader-Meinhof on and browse VICE for answers.
BGinCHI
@Baud: Freud N Schade.
Bubblegum Tate
@jl:
Shane was one of the founders of the magazine, along with Gavin McInnes and Suroosh Alvi. Vice News is basically an outgrowth of the magazine (since, you know, print is dead and all that).
Karen in GA
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s like a cross between a children’s show and a numbers station.
Omnes Omnibus
@Smiling Mortician: I suppose a certain type of vice could lead to pregnancy.
Baud
@srv:
If he isn’t a keynote speaker at the RNC convention, I’ll eat my hat.
The sad part is, if he had pushed an economic message, he could easily have been a solid number three in the primary. As it is, even Chaffee is kilometers ahead of Webb at this point.
Culture of Truth
Vice has been doing some really interesting stuff lately. What are CBS, NBC and ABC doing? True crime? Puppy videos? Sharks? Oh, and picking Bill Kristol’s brain.
BGinCHI
Just over 3 weeks until the first GOP debate. Can Trump hang on that long? Will anyone else get indicted?
I think that debate is going to be epic.
Roger Moore
@Karen in GA:
Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’
jl
@Bubblegum Tate: Thanks for info. I should have search for his biography first. I’ve watched a number of clips and specials by VICE News, from what I saw, the general tone and seriousness of their pieces seems very different from VICE magazine, which I never heard about until today.
Smiling Mortician
@Omnes Omnibus: The vices are so much more fun than the virtues.
Baud
@Smiling Mortician:
I’m still trying to figure out what category Balloon Juice falls into.
Omnes Omnibus
@Smiling Mortician: You’ll get no argument from me.
dmsilev
@srv:
Gee, I wonder why poor people in a Republican (at the time) state didn’t get any coverage in the ACA? Was it because a Republican Supreme Court Justice made that part of the ACA optional Because Reasons and a Republican state legislature decided Hell No? Or was it somehow the fault of Democrats?
Who, indeed, can tell?
jl
@Baud:
Maybe see link in
@Karen in GA: ?
Might be a place to start figuring it out.
Omnes Omnibus
@dmsilev: It’s like magnets.
jl
@dmsilev: Question I have is, if he really believes that boilerplate tripe (the very best kind of tripe, BTW), why is Webb running as a Democrat?
Amir Khalid
Help me understand this Jim Webb person. Is he really running as a Democratic candidate making his pitch only to white rural working-class people? I’d agree that the party needs to do better at attracting such people, but it draws on a much wider, multiracial base and is all the stronger for it. Narrowing its appeal to one white demographic, one that resents the rest of the party’s base, seems a self-defeating strategy.
Roger Moore
@Culture of Truth:
So has Buzzfeed. Basically, keeping the public informed is not profitable. If you want an actual news organization, it needs either patronage or to be otherwise tied to something profitable. Since Craigslist killed off classified ads, print news has been dying. TV news has degenerated into advertizing for other parts of the same media empire. The only way of making money seems to be cat videos and those stupid “viral” web ads.
jl
@Bubblegum Tate: Don’t know how I missed your capsule history of VICE Media in thread below. Thanks again for the info.
dmsilev
@Omnes Omnibus: See, “fucking magnets, how do they work?” is a question I can actually answer. What Webb thinks he’s doing, I have no fucking clue.
Culture of Truth
@Roger Moore: The Vice bits I’ve seen were on HBO, which is profitable, thanks to George R.R. Martin
jacel
On this topic, Obama should first appear for the full hour of a Rachel Maddow Friday night episode, right before she throws to MSNBC’s weekend prison shows.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: even Chaffee is kilometers ahead of Webb at this point
I see what you did there (but Chafee, one ‘F’)
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Amir Khalid:
He stole the keys from the Clinton 2007 campaign
danielx
@Baud:
Hmmmm….cancer? Leprosy?
Villago Delenda Est
The scum of the Village have no one but themselves to blame for their growing irrelevancy.
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid:
I’d argue, at this point, Webb’s decided to be the (D) candidate who “challenges” HRClinton to go right on his own favorite issues (those of white working-class voters, especially in Appalachia) just as Sanders is “challenging” her to go left on issues important to college-educated progressives. Webb’s always been “idiosyncratic”, which is the MSM formulation for “cranky & unpredictable”.
Also, he really really really doesn’t want America’s next president to get involved in any more foreign wars, short of a modern-day equivalent to Pearl Harbor. Since the conventional wisdom is that HRC will “have to” assert her macho foreign-policy credentials by, in neoconservative terms, threatening to “take some crappy little country by the collar and slam it against the wall”, Webb (presumably) wants to make sure that his own “let the foreigners sort out their own goddamned turf battles” isolationism can’t be blithely ignored.
Hungry Joe
I’m going to put in some time fantasizing about flying a couple of little drones over an Operation Jade Helm monitor group in Texas. Probably half of them would drop dead, and the other half would take each other out by blasting away wildly at the dastardly government spy-thingies.
Mission accomplished.
raven
After 31 years in Georgia I was just notified that I won the right to buy Maters practice round tickets in the lottery!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I would genuinely love to hear Webb explain how Democrats have excluded “working people”. the fact that he picks a health fair, the same ones Ed Schultz used to highlight to argue about the need for health care reform/Obamacare, to explain how “working people” have been left behind… I guess he knew where to go in order to avoid an argument.
@Gin & Tonic: Chafee has raised over Thirty. THOUSAND. Dollars. Add that to the $360K he loaned his own campaign, and stand back! the Chafee Express is leaving the station, turtles and sloths beware!
Baud
@raven:
Congratulations!
mdblanche
@Baud:
All of them.
@Amir Khalid: I think you understand him about as well as he can be understood.
Betty Cracker
@Anne Laurie: If she adopts Sanders’ economics and Webb’s foreign policy, I’d be cool with that! (Disclaimer: I’m not discounting the possibility that she’s always been west of her husband economically and less hawky than generally supposed…)
Gin & Tonic
@Roger Moore: So has Buzzfeed.
Indeed. As I mentioned in the DougJ thread upstairs, Vice News (which I now understand may be a largely separate operation) has been doing well-informed on-scene reporting from the Russia-Ukraine conflict since the beginning, and Buzzfeed as well. They have known more, faster, than most old-school Western reporters.
raven
@Baud: Thanks, I’m tickled pink!
mdblanche
@efgoldman: But what is that in metric money?
Mike J
@raven: They have practice rounds for tomatoes?
sharl
Jim Webb will be on The Diane Rehm Show tomorrow morning (live at 10am ET), so call in and ask how he celebrated Nathan Bedford Forrest Day, which – by state law! – was celebrated in Tennessee this very day, as it apparently is on July 13 of every year.
YEEEEEE-HAWWW!
Mike G
Meanwhile, in the Serious Media:
“Where’s Obama’s flag pin? Why does he hate America?”
“Next up, more questions about Benghazi!!”
“MH370 still missing, here’s another six hours of speculation pulled out of our asses”
raven
@Mike J: YIkes! Masters that is!
Amir Khalid
@Mike G:
MH370 was our plane, with our people on board, and we don’t obsess over it in Malaysia like CNN.
Emma
@Karen in GA: What the flipping hell was that?!
Amir Khalid
@Betty Cracker:
I’m concerned that Hillary’s Middle-East policy might turn out to have a pro-Israel bias. That’s what I sense from the noises she’s making.
jl
@sharl: Someone should call in and ask whether the Democrats or the Republicans forgot the good white working class and poor folks more, in the GOP states that did not expand Medicaid. I would like to hear Webb’s response to that.
Or who forgot the good white working class and poor folks more, Obama who wants free public community college, or GOPers who want to pump more educational loan money out of students, and who celebrate their status as modern day indentured servants to the banks?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Hungry Joe: Are you in the neigborhood?
@raven: About fucking time, isn’t it?
GregB
Lincoln Chafee raised the exact amount of money that Chris Christie has personally billed his campaign for food services at Blimpies
jl
@GregB: Just shows that Christie is a hands-on type of guy, and good for local business, is all.
raven
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I get in the lottery every year and this is a first. I probably could have begged them from some of the more connected folks I know here but I’m glad to get em on my own. My bride was surprised that I said she should go. I said “it’s one of the most beautiful gardens in the world”! That did it.
raven
@Amir Khalid: There is no question about it. I’ve also said it here a hundred times. If she wins she’s going to bomb the fuck out of the first thing that raised it’s head. Take it to the bank.
sharl
@Amir Khalid: Although I think we’re better than we used to be, I don’t believe we are yet at the point where any U.S. politician running for a national office – or even most statewide offices – can get through a campaign without publicly declaring their undying loyalty to, and unconditional love of Israel.
A politician might try to slip through a campaign without bringing up Israel at all, but I’m quite sure that will be quickly noticed, then your gonna get a lot of severe questions about ‘avoiding the issue’. Maybe best to just kiss Israel’s ass a few times early on, with all the sincerity that can be mustered, and hope the subject doesn’t come up much in the subsequent campaign. While (IMO) weaker than they used to be when Paul Findley first wrote about them, the social and political networks for enforcing this unquestioning loyalty remain quite robust.
Oh, and regarding your question about Webb, I forget where I read it, but a former staffer of his said he was quite a narcissist. I’m not sure that alone would explain matters even if true – hell, I think everyone who runs for that office, the best and worst, are all a bit tetched in the haid in some way or another. It’s damned near a prerequisite for seeking the position, AFAICT.
Poopyman
@jl:
Because he’s too claustrophobic to squeeze into the clown car?
raven
@sharl: He’s a fucking Jarhead officer and an Annapolis grad. What else would he be?
sharl
@raven: Haha, there’s that too!
Anne Laurie
@Betty Cracker:
You and me both!
That’s the main reason I’m not ragging on Webb — if his only contribution to the Democratic primaries is to be the Reagan-credentialled, ex-Marine Penis-American who argues against the Repub’s MOAR WARS EVERYWHERE ALWAYS attacks, that’s good enough by my lights.
raven
@Anne Laurie: Fuck him.
Culture of Truth
@efgoldman: Well sure, but those fees don’t happen by magic
Lurking Canadian
@Amir Khalid: This is dry-as-sandpaper snark, right?
jibeaux
Is it me, or does “move to the right to appeal to white poor rural voters” = promise them boatloads of earmarks without any pesky lefty talk so they can still feel superior to duskier welfare recipients and vote for you?
Lurking Canadian
@Omnes Omnibus: according to Reverend Malthus, Vice was the only means the poor had to avoid pregnancy.
Being Malthus, of course, he said it like it was a bad thing.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@raven: The beautiful gardens part would do it for me. I don’t suppose you’d permit me to accompany your bride?
I agree with you and have said dozens of times myself, Hillary is going to bomb the shit out of the first thing that moves, just to prove she’s got the balls to do it. I want to tell her “we know that, now calm the fuck down, please.”
Lurking Canadian
@jibeaux: I was trying to parse it, too. I think he’s probably got a few things in mind:
1) quit complaining about guns
2) quit complaining about racism
3) quit complaining about environmental destruction
4) quit regulating businesses so they can get on with creating jobs
He can’t possibly actually mean something about helping working class people, or he’d be all Unions! yay!; Obamacare yay!; OSHA yay! and it seems that is not his platform.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@jibeaux: I don’t think it’s even that deeply thought out, or that cynical. I think it’s a gut level belief, that he doesn’t even acknowledge to himself, that domestic politics is zero-sum contest between Them and Us. I know Webb likes to point out that his ancestors fought in every war since the Revolution, I have a feeling none of those ancestors were part of the Party of Lincoln.
Keith G
@efgoldman:
Especially black flags decorated with white butt plugs.
Another Holocene Human
Hey everybody, DougJ missed a trick on his last thread. The douchebag he linked is an MRA and a Gamergator. Not a nice person whatsoever, also totally full of shit every time he pops up. UK, you can keep him. No, we insist.
Capri
@Amir Khalid: 100% agree about Webb. Still, I’m glad the democratic party is still a big enough tent to include him. One of the reasons the republicans are in the pickle they are in is their inability to tolerate opposing voices.
Omnes Omnibus
@Lurking Canadian:
He was a bit of a killjoy.
Another Holocene Human
@sharl: rofl!
Sadly, Diane is quick to cut off callers. It’s no coast to coast.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: Webb is a Virginia Democrat, a former Secretary of the Navy and Assistant Secretary of Defense, and his conservative-white-guy-presenting form of Democratic politics used to play really well in Virginia; probably still does to some degree.
He became a Senator by running against incumbent, former governor, and son-of-beloved-football-coach George Allen, a hard-right pustule of a man who had sewn up Virginia’s powerful asshole vote, and had been considered impossible to beat until he suddenly discovered that in 2006 you couldn’t get away with calling brown people “macaca” any more.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, Webb basically thinks that he ought to be able to get elected President using the 1990s formula of being a Southern white guy who gets Democratic constituencies by being a Democrat, but can also peel off some fraction of the good old boys. Trouble is, you probably can’t get the Democratic nomination with that formula any more.
the Conster
Webb is wandering around with an onion on his belt talking to his Scots Irish peeps. He may be Grampa Simpson, but he’s our Grampa Simpson. He’s still tethered to reality, and if he motivates some sane people to show up and vote Democratic more power to him.
cckids
@Baud:
Rachel Maddow believes he’s running for the Republican VP spot.
Daulnay
Not sure why Obama would want to work with a Murdoch-backed ‘news’ organization like VICE, but he is. Won’t be surprised at all if VICE edits the piece into something awful.