Exclusive: Media company recently signed lucrative deal with Saudi government-controlled MBC Group

Exclusive: Media company recently signed lucrative deal with Saudi government-controlled MBC Group

  • BertramDitore@lemmy.worldEnglish
    93·
    1 year ago

    Welp, so much for Vice being a subversive voice of the people. They’re an embarrassing husk of their former selves.

    • ChocoboRocket@lemmy.world
      291·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, but at least it’s not government run media /s

      I’m in Canada and I find the reporting of CBC and TVO to be fairly good - and I can only imagine the news landscape when all news is 100% privately corpo owned

      Not to say either are beyond reproach when it comes to powerful special interests, but that only goes to show that monopolies are terrible and have unreasonable leverage and not some nihilistic comment on the nature of man or whatever.

  • Syldon@feddit.ukEnglish
    65·
    1 year ago

    We have to ban foreign nationals owning our media. They do not purchase media companies as business interests anymore; it is only ever about changing public opinion.

      • Syldon@feddit.ukEnglish
        31·
        1 year ago

        Why do you think they want to influence your opinion. It is all about making money, and a lot more than they expect from some crappy newspaper. GB news hasn’t made a single penny in profits, and yet are still giving out £100,000 pa contracts.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      OTOH, Vice is a private company.

      One could argue I guess that per country, international companies need to have distinct subsidiaries and those need to be fully owned and operated in that country only with no international cash flow.

      But it’d be quite difficult to enforce, I’d imagine.

      • Syldon@feddit.ukEnglish
        22·
        1 year ago

        Make it illegal to publish news media inside the borders if you are a foreign national. I wouldn’t have thought that a difficult concept.

  • Fantomas@lemmy.world
    462·
    1 year ago

    Remember when you could count on vice to have a spine?

    Just a bunch of jokers now.

    • Fazoo@lemmy.ml
      21·
      1 year ago

      They’ve been a joke for years. Their best reporters left or got promoted out of the picture. Once Shane stopped going out on reports and Ben left, they were done.

      • Fazoo@lemmy.ml
        5·
        1 year ago

        The early days were fantastic. Shane had some solid stories around NK.

        • prole@sh.itjust.works
          13·
          1 year ago

          The “early days” of Vice is a shitty hipster magazine full of snarky insults about random people’s clothes.

    • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
      45·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, people complain about this (rightfully so) but it’s still worlds apart from the muzzled or murdered press in places like China and Russia.

      • aberrate_junior_beatnik@midwest.socialEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        I don’t disagree with you factually, but why bring this up? This is essentially the same as pointing out that women have it worse elsewhere in the world anytime we talk about patriarchy in the US.

        • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
          44·
          1 year ago

          Because there’s a ton of CCP and Kremlin propaganda on Lemmy and some people need to be reminded of the truth.

          • Durotar@lemmy.ml
            2·
            1 year ago

            The truth is that Russia and China are not related to this post at all. If anything, you’re trying to downplay the issue, but it is slow degradation what allows these things to establish as something normal and acceptable.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    142·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Editors in Vice’s news division actively welcomed the piece, Lubbock said, as it fitted with the outlet’s track record of reporting on LGBTQ+ rights, autocratic regimes and the Middle East.

    In another recent example, a film in the Vice world news Investigators series about Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was deleted from the internet after being uploaded.

    Five years ago the company paused its work in Saudi Arabia following the state-backed murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi but has since enthusiastically embraced the kingdom.

    This time around, rather than pulling back from the country and enabling such pieces to be published, Vice, which last week was bought out of bankruptcy, is rapidly expanding in Saudi Arabia, as part of a wider strategy of shifting away from news and towards lifestyle content.

    Until recently, ordinary Saudis feared a visit from the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a powerful religious authority that enforced strict Islamic morals and cracked down on youth culture.

    Saudi Arabia’s national investment fund has already bought Newcastle United, managed to wrestle partial control of golf and is paying unprecedented sums to lure some of the world’s top footballers to the country.

    I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • Jack@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Editors in Vice’s news division actively welcomed the piece, Lubbock said, as it fitted with the outlet’s track record of reporting on LGBTQ+ rights, autocratic regimes and the Middle East.

      Bad bot. The sentences before and after this are needed to understand the quoted sentence:

      “Their reporting claimed the Saudi state is helping families to harass and threaten transgender Saudis based overseas.”

      […]

      “However, publication of the article was repeatedly postponed and then cancelled at the last minute. Multiple sources at Vice said it was pulled after a high-level intervention by senior Vice managers, who said its publication could pose a threat to the safety of the company’s staff working in Saudi Arabia.”

    • RealJoL@feddit.de
      4·
      1 year ago

      One small upcoming one is Popular Front, but they seem to have a stronger focus on conflict reporting and the subcultures associated with it. Seems to be a Vice News for Gen Z.

    • charlytune
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’m fairly sure the Guardian were accused of toning down human rights stories about one country (I think like Bahrain or Oman or Qatar maybe?) as they were running an advertising supplement for their tourism board. It was covered in Private Eye so I don’t know if the article will be available online. So if I’m remembering that correctly, the Guardian have got a bit of a cheek here.

      • Historical_General@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        They were also raided by uk intelligence after the snowden stuff, and are no longer independant. Never donate to them or even use the links - use the archive.is links .

        :)

      • downpunxx@kbin.social
        37·
        1 year ago

        They are, after 600 thousand dead Iraqis to distract away from Saudi 911 terrorists, one is so much worse its on another plane of existence

    • Skyler@kbin.social
      10·
      1 year ago

      “It’s good that Saudi Arabia is causing our media to censor itself because we invaded Iraq.”

      If that’s not the point you’re conveying, then whatever point it is that you’re feebly TRYING to convey is falling flat on its face.

      • cooljacob204@kbin.social
        71·
        1 year ago

        Every thread has an what about Iraq poster now. Even pretty unrelated ones like this.

        Fucking bots. Tired of these assholes using it at an excuse for continued injustices.

        • Jack@lemmy.caEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          This whataboutism may not be saying that what the Saudis are doing is excusable, but instead pointing out the hypocrisy and saying that if you’re going to complain about the psychotic Saudi regime, you have to admit that the voters who elected Bush and then re-elected him after his invasion of Iraq, are vastly worse than the Saudis. It’s important to know if we are the baddies, especially if we are vastly worse and propping up the Saudis.

          I think it’s important to criticize and boycott the psychotic Saudi regime, but also to keep in perspective that there are worse people out there: people who are orders-of-magnitude worse.

          Iraqi deaths in the Iraq war in the 8 years from 2003 to 2011 = approximately 461 000 (PLOS Medicine 2013) to 655 000 (Lancet 2006 (PDF)).

          That’s currently even worse than the psychotic Russian invasion of Ukraine:

          I’m not sure about the Saudi/Kuwait/UAE/Egypt/Morocco/Jordan/Sudan/Senegal/Bahrain/Blackwater (supported by US/UK/France) coalition’s actions in the war in Yemen since 2015.

          Edit: I’m also not sure how many the Saudis have killed in the Iran-Saudi proxy wars, so maybe the Saudis do actually have more direct blood on their hands than the western powers in the last 50 years or so.