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How Vice Went From New Media Giant to Saudi Propaganda Machine
In 2013, not long after I started working for Vice, which I left in 2022 to join Novara Media, Smith celebrated the company’s break-neck expansion with typical braggadocio: he stripped naked and walked around talking to employees at the New York office for a video to mark Vice getting 2,000,000 YouTube subscribers. A decade later, it was just the latest new media company that had failed to turn its large audience and billions of dollars of investment into a viable business.
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The company has gone to great lengths to protect its business with Saudi Arabia, which is investing in western media in order to buff its image. Novara Media has been told that Vice has even played down security risks to LGBTQ+ staff working in the kingdom, while using vague security concerns as “a shield” to stop the publication of critical articles about Saudi.
The company’s ties with Saudi – which would seem to be at odds with its liberal, anti-authoritarian image, but not with its money-hungry corporate culture – go back to at least to 2018. That summer, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, met Smith on a yacht off the Red Sea coast in order to discuss the building of “an international media empire to combat the kingdom’s rivals and remake its image in the West,” reported the Washington Post.
The kingdom-building project was delayed however, as in October 2018, the company paused its contract with Saudi publishing group SMRG following the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the behest of MBS.
The pause wasn’t to last. Less than a year later, in September 2019, Vice released a fluffy video about a camel race in the desert, made in association with Saudi Research and Marketing Group, telling viewers that to Saudi’s elite, camels are “a source of national pride, and even regional solidarity”. In 2020, Vice’s creative marketing agency Virtue organised a Saudi-state sponsored music and culture festival in the middle of the desert, headlined by Jean-Michel Jarre and Tinie Tempah.
‘We can’t even do basic news about Saudi.’
This rang hollow for one current Vice employee, who told Novara Media: “Editorial independence is clearly unworkable with the Saudi operation. We can’t even do basic news about Saudi.”
In May, Vice indefinitely held an article and video it had prepared about a widely-reported story of a Saudi woman who was imprisoned for 30 years for protesting the government’s NEOM linear city project due to security concerns about staff and freelancers who had been deployed to Saudi. “Everywhere did it [the story], and we couldn’t do it,” the staffer said.
https://novaramedia.com/2023/08/25/how-vice-went-from-new-media-giant-to-saudi-propaganda-machine/
How corrupt media operates (and why supporting people-powered media might be the way forward to save western democracies).
