Vice

The lack of polish makes Vice all the more riveting. [5 Apr 2013, p.63]

It's graphic--disturbingly and, some would say, unnecessarily, so.... But it's also intelligent and enlightening.

This isn’t look-at-me journalism with a fitted Gap t-shirt. It’s more of a holy-hell-can-you-believe-this approach that fights perfectly on a cable channel trying to do something different.

Despite showing some very gruesome imagery--a real decapitated head, for example--and having a swaggy, “we’re so hip we send our reporters into dangerous places looking like they just rolled out of bed” self-aggrandizement, Vice is fundamentally earnest.

What Vice offers is not deep or thorough, but it is not without value. The news comes in pieces now; to get the full picture, you have to assemble it yourself.

Vice seems to be in search of some sweet spot between “60 Minutes” and “Jackass,” and there’s enough here to suggest that such a spot may exist. The concept could work, especially if Smith and his correspondents were more inclined to point the cameras away from themselves.

The problem with Vice isn’t its insistent aggrandizement but its excessive softheadedness. It’s journalism at the intersection of shallow and gullible, where they meet, high-five and compare tattoos.