Why are CNN and HuffPo Eating Up Vice Magazine’s Pathetic Reporting on Liberia?

While the average consumer of travel journalism may feel besieged by the mediocrity of mainstream “vacation” media, it’s a piece of widely distributed hipster travel reportage that takes the prize for the most disturbing and dangerous rhetoric  in recent months.

The Vice Magazine Guide to Liberia is negligent, irresponsible, and contemptuous of its audience, the travel media industry, and, worst of all, the nation it portends to cover. The piece manages this while trying to tout itself as a form of edgy journalism, shocking in places, humorous in others.  But there is nothing funny about the guide. It’s an unforgivable parachute hack job that perpetuates the Africa-heart-of-darkness stereotype.

Let’s start with some quotes that Vice editor/presenter Shane Smith uses to describe Liberia:

“Cannibalism, chaos, killing, rape everything.”

“Child junkies, shit and piss everywhere, malaria, AIDS, rape and now we start hearing about cannibalism.”

“This is the exemplification of hell, really.”

“Heavy.” “Freaky.”

This is standard Africa-as-hellhole stuff. People are clichés — brutalizer or brutalized. It’s trite, recycled, and much of it is either false or exaggerated (more on this below). Vice Magazine’s Liberia is a black, jungly version of Mad Max, only produced to provide the couch-bound with a cheap, vicarious thrill. And this tactic works, as evidenced by comments made about the guide’s trailer:

“Now that is what I call ” RAW FOOTAGE “!!! We don’t see this in the States!!! That’s on my to watch list most def!!! Looks off tha hook!”

This isn’t the sort of reaction good journalism engenders because the Vice guide isn’t journalism. It’s entertainment.

Nonetheless, CNN and the Huffington Post have been eating Vice up, giving them interviews and accolades, which demonstrates why the piece can be so damaging: even ostensibly respectable media organizations with huge audiences want to believe Liberia is a hellhole.

An important disclaimer before I continue: I have never been to Liberia. I’m coming at Vice more as a travel writer than Liberia-lover (objections of which exist in other locations online). But I know several people intimately tied to the country. And I’ve been a reporter and travel writer long enough in both Africa and post-conflict zones (not that the two are synonymous - although Vice gives that impression) to know when a piece of journalism is designed to sensationalize rather than address anything like the truth of a place.

The very generalized and simplified truth of Liberia is that it’s hurt and wobbly but on the road to recovery. It’s the oldest independent republic in Africa, founded by freed American slaves. It weathered an unimaginably brutal civil war in the 1980’s, 90’s and early 2000’s, preceded by decades of social turmoil and economic mismanagement. In 2003, the then-largest UN military mission in the world imposed peace. In 2005, the country held its first free and fair elections, choosing Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a reform-minded do-er, as the continent’s first ever female head of state. It’s a pretty damn positive story, all things considered.

But the guys at Vice could not give a damn. President Sirleaf is never mentioned. Stock footage from Liberia’s war years, taken before her current, relatively stable administration, is jumbled with modern camera work with no disclaimer given. Thus the majority of viewers will assume AK-47s are still rumbling across Monrovia. The ripple effect has already occurred; CNN uses the caption (albeit in quotes) “It’s World War 3 in Liberia” in its story on the Vice guide.

In fact, the Liberian Civil War ended in 2003. And while there have been outbreaks of gang violence since then, there has been no sustained combat for seven years, despite the assertions of one General “Rambo,” interviewed in the guide, who says that the war is “hot.”

Rambo’s claim, like many throughout the piece, is not pressed or questioned. And it is false. There’s no organized insurrection occurring in Liberia thanks to a UNMIL presence of 10,000 soldiers with a Chapter VII mandate, the most robust UN peacekeeping clause, which allows the use of force to maintain peace and security, unlike a weaker Chapter VI mandate.

In fact, Rambo acknowledges the above, and says that if the UN left Liberia would descend into chaos. Vice then claims “the UN is scheduled to leave next year.” This assertion is repeated at the end of the piece, and it’s a lie. The UNMIL charter is up for renewal this year, but this is a bureaucratic given — it’s technically renewed every year — and there is no plan for the UN mission to leave the country.

This sort of willful distortion, in addition to pandering patent falsehoods, infects the piece. When a young man raps about AIDS, the implication is the disease is devastating Liberia. But the Liberian AIDS adult infection rate is under 2 percent. To not present this fact in conjunction with the rapper’s song is weak reporting.

Much of the guide is guilty of shallow, and sometimes plain bad, sourcing. If you went by the one-sided interview subject selected for the piece, you’re left thinking all Liberians are maimed or thugs or hungry or abused or psycho or crazy — rarely people.

No Liberian government or UN officials are interviewed. Some of the subjects that do receive camera attention are clearly mentally unstable. At one point, former general “Butt Naked” explains the origins of his name: “Once I’m naked, no bullet can hurt me. Once I’m naked, I can disappear.” This obviously not-too-sane man is presented as an unquestioned authoritative source. At another point Vice does a man on the street interview with someone who has just smoked heroin. The subject is plainly, to use the technical term, melted. Does the mumbling drug addict on the street have any kind of credibility in your eyes? Yet that person is the one Vice goes to for commentary on the state of Liberian society.

If scientists publish hoped-for results instead of evidence-based experiments, we call them liars. The same goes for “journalists” who operate on assumptions. At one point, Smith decides to see what the Liberian government is “doing” for its people by visiting the notorious slum of West Point in Monrovia. This is like a foreign TV crew deciding to see what Barack Obama is “doing” by going to the South Bronx. It implies the government isn’t doing anything — even as the Vice crew drive along new roads in a country where billions of dollars of international debt have been canceled due to government efforts, alongside buses that are providing, for the first time, public transportation for the Liberian people.

You wouldn’t know about this laudable civil work from the piece. Vice interviews ex-warlords who claim to be the only force for betterment within their communities; Smith nods along without questioning these assertions. Again, if a foreign TV crew interviewed a drug dealer who said his gang was the only source of civic support in his community, and the crew took that statement at face value, how would we react?

Throughout the guide Vice disrespects the people of Liberia, turning them into a They that the viewers can safely measure their lives against, an Other in an alien world outside of true empathy or concern. Shane Smith smirks constantly, presenting his subjects as morbid curiosities, but he doesn’t treat Liberians with the respect due human beings. The aforementioned heroin addict, who claims to have raped women, is perhaps 14 years old. By interviewing him, Vice has violated his rights as a minor — even if the boy said he wanted to be interviewed, he is too young to provide informed consent to admit to crimes on camera.

Perhaps worse: In the beginning of the piece, Smith tells the audience that he is off to interview a former warlord dubbed Gen. “Bin Laden” who is in jail “because we suspected the authorities had arrested him because we were coming to interview him” (no evidence is presented to support this claim). Within the prison, the police give Vice some attitude. Smith reacts as if the Gestapo were jackbooting his throat.

Again; if our hypothetical foreign TV crew came into an American prison unannounced wanting to interview someone, wouldn’t the local police question their presence? Where does Vice get the sense of entitlement to just flit in and out of — and ignore — the rules of Liberian jurisprudence?

No worries. Shane Smith proceeds to bribe the police, which undermines the rule of law and at least indirectly encourages other foreigners to follow suit. Then Vice proceeds to spring Bin Laden out of prison. This is horribly irresponsible. Here is a country attempting to heal deep-seated wounds caused by the very person you have released back into the community, Vice. You have taken a man who has at least ordered (if not outright committed) rape and murder out of incarceration and reintroduced him to his victims. The kicker? The Vice crew wonders why everyone around them suddenly seems angry.

After all of the above, accusing the guys at Vice of being bad travel writers is a small condemnation. But their failings on this front annoy me on a professional level. Good travel is going to another place, learning from it, and seeing ‘foreign’ people as anything but. Good travel media expands the above, and the world, by taking the intimacy of finding common humanity and stretching it past the little borders, political, geographic and mental, that life throws in our path.

Bad travel is about going somewhere and reconfirming everything you thought you knew before you left, and this is exactly what Vice does in Liberia. It’s worse than being close-minded because it’s cloaked under the fig leaf of being exploratory. Bad travel journalism is a step up; it closes minds that may have considered exploration. Awful travel journalism pisses on all of the above by insulting the place visited. Unforgivable travel journalism commits the same acts and victimizes a people who lack a voice in the modern media chorus.

Actually, Liberians don’t always lack a voice. If you do nothing else today, please visit Ceasefire Liberia, a storytelling bridge between the Liberian nation and Diaspora. See documentaries like Iron Ladies of Liberia and Pray the Devil Back to Hell. If you want to see good conflict footage, catch Liberia: Uncivil War, shot by Tim Hetherington, the only Western journalist to be behind rebel lines during the civil war.

This is how Liberia should be presented to the outside world: truthfully, with a clear eye that loves enough to show the warts without mocking the nation for possessing them. That’s good storytelling because it has empathy. The Vice Guide just makes people tools of its narrative purpose, and as such, it is sociopathy: dehumanizing a subject so you can use it for your own ends.

But the worst crime of the Vice guide is potentially hindering the rebuilding of Liberia — even though Shane Smith claims to want to change the way people see the country. (He says this to a church congregation. Yes: He lies to an entire church).

Actually, one of the best things that can help Liberia is foreign investment and an international understanding of the nation’s new realities. There is tentative progress currently coming about after substantial international engagement. Attention is needed from the Liberian Diaspora community. Basically, the country needs financial and human capital.

But these two important tools of regrowth may well be frightened off by the effrontery that is this guide. Damn you for that, Vice. I hope every pain that you’ve inflicted on Liberia keeps you up at night. But I doubt it: If you had any shame, this trash would have never been published.

Email