Bad Investment? Disney Reportedly Doesn't Think It Can Recoup $400 Mil. It Sunk Into Vice Media

Nick Kangadis | May 10, 2019
DONATE
Font Size

(Headline Image: YouTube Screenshot/Vice Co-Founders Suroosh Alvi & Shane Smith)

Political persuasion is big business and all of us are the unwitting targets of a practice that attempts to masquerade itself as news when, in reality, it’s sole purpose is to denigrate, persuade and cajole people into thinking that one particular side of the political spectrum is worse than the other.

Unfortunately, for a lot of these “news outlets,” once the big corporations get all the use they desire out of a particular organization, the money they once invested dries up and said big corporation moves on to its next host.

Fortunately, for the rest of us, the majority of the examples of the practice described above reside on the left, in places that are known for their presence as mouthpieces of the far-left narrative.

That’s why it shocked me to see that left-leaning outlet Vox reported that Disney doesn’t see near the same value in left-leaning news outlet Vice as it did when they sunk “more than $400 million” into the digital media organization.

According to Vox:

Just a few years ago, big media companies were falling over themselves to bet on Vice Media. Disney made the biggest bet, by putting more than $400 million into the swashbuckling digital publisher.

Now, Disney says all of the money it put into Vice has been incinerated: In investor filings Wednesday, Disney said it no longer thinks it will ever get any return on the investment it made in Vice — a company that at one point was supposedly worth $5.7 billion.

Vice is still worth something, in some investors’ eyes. Last week, a group of lenders said they put a fresh round of $250 million into the company.

What Vox didn’t mention, although they did include the link above, was that one of the “lenders” that “put a fresh round of $250 million” into Vice includes mega-donor to the left George Soros.

“The consortium was led by 23 Capital and includes Soros Fund Management LLC, Mr. Soros’s investment fund, as well as Fortress Investment Group LLC and Monroe Capital, according to people familiar with the matter,” the Wall Street Journal’s Lillian Rizzo wrote last week.

Vox also noted multiple other left-leaning digital media outlets that had millions of dollars poured into them in the last few years, including themselves. Most, if not all of the media organizations that were mentioned to receive huge sums of money did so in the year-and-a-half lead up to the 2016 election.

Independent journalist and YouTuber Tim Pool, who previously had worked at Vice, noted that companies like Vice and Fusion didn’t have sustainable models because they focused more on being “woke” than the actual news.

“I know firsthand from working at Vice and Fusion, which is now called Splinter News, that this push didn’t work,” Pool said in a Thursday YouTube video report. “It’s one of the reasons I left Fusion. They thought that if they went full woke they’d make money. But, in fact, they got woke and went broke.”

donate