Vice can be virtuous

I don't know too much about gonzo journalism, except that its founder-practitioner Hunter S. Thompson wrote this extraordinary travelogue/report on Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

The subjective impression of Las Vegas life and the writer's experience of it makes for astoundingly dynamic writing. 

One would imagine that gonzo journalism could never be part of mainstream journalistic practice, though god knows how truly subjective is your avowedly "objective" journalism of today's day and age. 

It would be "way cool" if somebody were to nurture the art of Thompson and attain success. So, I was delighted to get acquainted with Vice Media and its love for doing news the gonzo way. 

The Brooklyn-based company (headquartered in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) recently brokered a contact between the United States and North Korea, the taboo-nation par excellence by arranging the visit of former NBA star and pro-basketball's infant terrible, Denis Rodman to North Korea. Rodman met the dictator who is a NBA fanatic, and said to Kim, "Sir, you have a friend for life."

Vice got a lot of heat for proctoring such an "unpatriotic" meeting, but the videos were instant hits on youtube.

If you look at vice Media's profile, the Denis Rodman kind of news is typical of what the company loves to do. Billing itself as a "global MTV on steroids," and "Time Warner of the Streets," Vice wants to become the largest network for all the young people of the world. 

In an effort to steal the hard-to-get attention of the global Millennials, Vice 

[...] Takes on subjects from political assassinations in the Philippines to India’s nuclear standoff with Pakistan. It showcases the company’s signature brand of gonzo journalism, which it calls “immersionism.” Vice sends its staff members—generally tattooed young reporters in skinny jeans with scruffy facial hair—into dangerous, far-flung places. 

Shane Smith, Vice's CEO and in many ways an embodiment of its wild and edgy spirit calls himself “the poor man’s Hemingway,” and curiously omits mentioning Thompson's name. Smith summarizes his life style thus: 

Bon vivant, storyteller, drunk. Let’s have fourteen bottles of wine at dinner, roast suckling pig, and a story about chopping a dude’s head off in the desert.