We watch Vice News very frequently. Every few days, we’ll sit and watch the Vice News Tonight for the last few days. It’s almost become a ritual now – a few days of Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, then one night of Vice. It’s a good way to get a very different perspective on world news.
I’ve never had any problem with the way they cover their topics. But recently, I saw the April 27th episode and I have a request and a complaint. Vice News Tonight made a mistake with these two topics –
- Milo
-
The writers guild strike
The Milo topic should just not be covered. Why give a vile man any more screen space than he deserves – none? The entire segment was just dedicated to giving him as much time to show his face as possible. That’s just offensive to anyone with any sensibility.
The writers guild strike is an important and interesting topic. But after the initial explanation of the topic, the Vice News reporter launched into a story about how the writers’ strike has helped Donald Trump in the past. There are many different perspectives from which this topic would be very interesting and I’m sorry to say but this was by far the worst of them all.
I understand that Vice must give a certain level of creative freedom to their reporters and must also consider a lot of variables when thinking about how to best present a story. But among all those ways to cover the story is also the wrong and untimely one. Had the question been about Donald Trump’s rise to celebrity, this would have been the right approach. But it wasn’t. It was about how the writers’ guild strike would affect people – viewers, writers, and those dependent on the writers to churn out scripts. The segment ignored all of them to focus on the one man who could easily not have been brought into the topic.
Vice also ensures that when we see a topic, we look at the money behind it. The report about bats and the white nose disease told us how bats save billions of dollars worth of crops a year. The report about Nollywood told how it is a $3 Billion business, instead of just focusing on the cultural aspect of it. The report about Bananas and monocultures showed us that depending on a single clone of a crop is just bananas. But when it came to the writers guild topic, they went off on a tangent.
Hopefully Vice will not make such editorial mistakes again. I love every TV offering by Vice and feel they really hit the mark every time. Which is why it’s irritating when they missed this one time.