Mother Jones illustration; Andy Kropa/Invision/AP
For the past month, Vice co-founder and CEO Shane Smith has had a remarkable number of questions, which he’s posed in a new interview show titled, appropriately, “Shane Smith Has Questions.”
The show, which airs on YouTube and on Vice’s cable TV channel, is clearly meant to be a return to form for both Smith and the company after its bankruptcy, sale to a hedge fund, the layoff of hundreds of employees, and what Smith has recently described as a regrettable, years-long foray into wokeism.
If Smith has questions, so might viewers, including about his aims and standards of fact-checking.
“Now, more than ever, the truth is unclear,” Smith proclaims in an intro sequence. “What’s real, what’s fake, and who’s manipulating the narratives that have us questioning our facts.” As the podcast’s somewhat garbled YouTube description puts it, the show is “dedicated to getting to the bottom of prominent instances of misinformation and disinformation while revealing the fascinating fundamental truths (if there are any?) of the most interesting and convoluted social and political issues of our time.”
But in the course of supposedly investigating disinformation, Smith has also promoted it, along with conspiracy theories, questionable sources, and right-wing narratives that are depicted as objective fact.
As The Intercept recently noted, the show has advanced several anti-immigration tropes, titling one video “This is how illegals are sneaking into the USA.” (The word “illegals” was later replaced with “people.”) Another recent show discussed how “droves” of Chinese nationals are coming to the US; the sole interviewee was Todd Bensman, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank.
Then there are the conspiracy theories: In an episode on the July assassination attempt against Donald Trump, Shane promoted the idea there was something suspicious. “Who’s trying to kill Trump and why?” the show’s title pontificated. Although he took no position on such theories, Smith gave generous air time to the notion that the Deep State or a possible second shooter could have been involved. He also speculated that mysterious forces could have played a role in what he termed “a coverup” of the real sequence of events.
“The more these people talk, the more suspicious it seems,” said one Smith guest, retired Canadian military sniper and YouTuber Dallas Alexander. He speculated to Smith that there had been a “second shooter” targeting Trump, an assertion with no evidence but that was presented with equal weight as other claims.
The show also, inevitably, features suspicion-mongering about Covid vaccines. During a conversation with former Twitch streamer Destiny, Smith indicated he feels “duped” by mainstream advice on Covid vaccines and now believes them to have undisclosed side effects that were also covered up by the government.
If Smith has questions, so might anyone viewing the show: about what its aims are, its standards for fact-checking, and why it consistently adopts anti-immigration narratives, despite Smith being a Canadian immigrant himself. (A public relations professional who’s recently spoken on Vice’s behalf did not respond to a request for comment, and an email address for the company’s press office no longer works.)
A number of disclosures are necessary here: I was a reporter at Vice News from October 2019 to February 2024, when the majority of staff were laid off. I’m also one of a small group of remote staffers who filed an unsuccessful National Labor Relations Board complaint arguing Vice should have given us the same 90-day layoff notices as our New York-based colleagues.
Before and during my employment, my colleagues at Vice racked up acclaim and awards for their work on immigration, corporate corruption, and the far right, including a 2017 Peabody for Vice News Tonight’s reporting on the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. When I worked there, Smith was understood to no longer be directly involved in day-to-day operations, having been replaced as CEO in 2018 following a number of unflattering stories about a culture of sexual harassment. At the time, Smith and another co-founder, Suroosh Alvi, apologized in a statement to the New York Times for having failed “to create a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone, especially women, can feel respected and thrive.” (Vice also settled a class action suit in 2019 alleging it underpaid women.) Smith was replaced as CEO by Nancy Dubuc and assumed the title of executive chairman.
But his involvement continued in ways that weren’t always obvious to the newsroom. Vice employees learned from Smith’s divorce filings in 2022 that he was being paid a $1.6 million annual salary, with another $1,400 a month in what were termed “perquisites.” In 2023, New York magazine reported that Smith had a “secret” multimillion-dollar deal with the company.
Smith’s sources and guests don’t always make sense.
Whatever its terms, he wasn’t completely absent. I have never met or spoken with him, but during my time at Vice, he once popped up in a Zoom meeting, generating a quiet round of confusion before he quickly disconnected. During the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the company launched an interview show called “Shelter in Place” that Smith conducted from his Pacific Palisades mansion, hollering questions over video at guests that included Edward Snowden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and George Floyd’s brother Philonise. (During their conversation, Smith professed wholehearted support for the Black Lives Matter movement.)
After Vice filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2023 and conducted massive layoffs nine months later, Smith was again named as Vice’s CEO in June 2024. At the time, the company also announced that he would return as the newsroom’s editor in chief and host a new “video podcast” set to be titled Vice News: The Truth?, which would feature talk show host and HBO fixture Bill Maher as a recurring guest. On Instagram, Smith promised that he “and the OG @billmaher” would “get deep into the ’24 election cycle.”
In October, when Smith finally launched his new show, it was under the “Shane Smith Has Questions” title. The third episode consisted of a Maher interview—and was promoted on a flashy Times Square billboard, which says that “Questions” is produced by Vice and Maher’s company Club Random Studios. Maher has yet to return to “Questions,” but Smith did appear separately on Maher’s own Club Random podcast, where he took the opportunity to depict Vice’s heyday as an unfortunate detour, specifically regretting how the company grew tiresomely critical of people like Elon Musk, solely because, as Smith put it, “he’s rich.”
“We at Vice—and I publicly apologize, Elon—used to shit on him,” Smith told Maher. “And I’d be like, ‘Why are you shitting on the guy? He’s great.’”
Sometimes, Smith’s wealth and celebrity—along what seems to be a rightward turn—create excellent interview opportunities. In the “Shane Smith Has Questions” episode on the Trump assassination attempt, he interviewed Kurt Schiller, the former head of Donald Trump’s security detail, introducing him as “my friend.” For an episode on protecting Trump, there’s arguably no better source.
But Smith’s sources and guests don’t always make sense: In the assassination episode, he also interviewed a triad of YouTubers whose main qualification seems to be that they have declared themselves to be weapons experts, as well as Gerald Posner, a journalist and author who left the Daily Beast in 2010 after he was found to have plagiarized. (Posner used his appearance to suggest that there were unanswered questions about the Trump shooting, drawing a parallel to JFK’s assassination, which he authored a book about in 2003. But Posner’s book concludes that Oswald likely acted alone and that broader conspiracies are unfounded.)
A November episode interviewing Destiny, the Twitch streamer, featured the two men, neither of whom have any medical training, trying to parse the difference between myocarditis and pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation; both are rare side effects of Covid vaccines mostly seen in young men.
During that episode, Smith indicated there would be a forthcoming podcast wholly devoted to Covid and vaccines. Unsurprisingly, he voiced questions about those too.
“I was a pro-vaxxer,” he told Destiny, describing himself as having been “part of the fuckin’ media” that was pushing vaccinations. Now, Smith said, he has concerns about side effects and suggested he has “friends who have had heart attacks” because they had “a certain kind of genetic disorder” that he said was exacerbated by vaccines.
“We were lied to. We’re now finding out that a lot of that was covered up,” Smith went on. “That’s government testimony, that’s Fauci’s testimony, that’s the Senate, that’s the surgeon general.” (It’s unclear what Smith was referring to, but neither Anthony Fauci nor the surgeon general have indicated that they’ve come to believe Covid vaccines are in any way unsafe.)
“I feel duped,” Smith added.
When the promised Covid episode appeared a week later, it was wholly devoted to an interview with Brianne Dressen, a Utah mother who has claimed that she was injured and became disabled during 2020 trials for the AstraZeneca vaccine. (The company’s vaccine was one of the earliest on the market worldwide, but was phased out in most countries when newer mRNA vaccines were introduced. It was discontinued in May 2024 due to low demand.)
Smith can’t seem to decide if he wants to debunk disinformation or embrace it.
After her experience, Dressen sued AstraZeneca for breach of contract, a lawsuit that is ongoing. She also became the founder of React19, a group which says it advocates for patients injured by Covid vaccines. Many of the group’s purported experts have ties with the anti-vaccine movement or previously advocated for pseudomedical Covid treatments. React19 has featured video interviews with Dr. Pierre Kory, who promoted ivermectin as a Covid treatment for years, despite a huge body of evidence that it is ineffective. (Kory eventually lost his board certification with the American Board of Internal Medicine, which his ivermectin-promoting group attributed to his advocacy for “early treatments” and “repurposed medications.”) Another person offering “patient education” at React19 is Josh Guetzkow, an assistant criminology professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who has no apparent medical training; he maintains a Substack devoted to his objections and self-styled reporting into what he believes are the dangers of Covid vaccines.
Dressen has been interviewed by Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization. The organization’s media arm, The Defender, has positively covered her lawsuit, suggesting it could make it possible to sue vaccine manufacturers in civil court. (Since 1989, a federal compensation program has steered people who believe they were injured by such shots to a specialized court with judges expert in vaccine law.)
React19 clearly has political aims that go beyond vaccines. Along with the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, React19 submitted an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri, in which the plaintiffs claimed that the federal government had pressured social media companies to censor conservative views. (React19 argued it had been censored from discussing vaccine side effects.)
On Smith’s program, however, all of that context is missing; Dressen is simply depicted as a former preschool teacher turned patient advocate, whose eyes were opened to the dangers of vaccines. In her comments to Smith, Dressen merges her own experience with the eventually discontinued AztraZeneca shot with people she claims were injured by later mRNA vaccines and even non-Covid vaccines, claiming there are also risks to HPV and flu shots. While there are rare but real chances of serious side effects from any vaccine, the broad takeaway from Smith’s show is to suggest a vast cover-up, a body of evidence kept hidden from the public about the shots’ purported dangers; in other words, he puts forth a classic conspiracy theory.
This is a viewpoint with which Smith clearly agrees. “We’re limping towards honesty,” Smith told Dressen, seemingly referring to the public conversation about Covid vaccines. “Because people like yourself are forcing us to look honestly and factually at what actually happened.”
The credulity and threadbare context in the Dressen episode showcases some of the strangest features of “Shane Smith Has Questions.” Smith can’t quite seem to decide if he wants to debunk disinformation or embrace it, whether to position himself as a fact-seeking journalist or a reflexive skeptic of the establishment. In his meandering remarks on the show, he reflects a belief that some right-leaning conspiracy theories have been proven true, an overall sense of personal disaffection with liberal ideas, and a desire, above all, to ingratiate himself with a new audience.
Indeed, as Semafor recently reported, Smith’s producers have made overtures to conservative podcasters and what the story called “manosphere personalities,” seeking to have them on the show by convincing them Smith was never as “woke” as Vice appeared to be. “According to his producers,” explains Semafor’s Max Tani, “Smith’s previous relationships with corporate media figures during Vice’s heyday—Disney was a major investor—made him sacrifice his male fans to chase an imaginary audience, in their telling.” Thus far, Tani reported, the figures they’ve approached have responded coolly.
Whether Smith’s new conservative turn is a business strategy or a sincere philosophical pivot isn’t something that can be answered from the outside.
But watching Smith’s new show, it does seem like the media mogul has questions: wandering, digressive, and some of them already answered if he looked outside his guests. But, it must be admitted, they are questions nonetheless. As Smith voices them in every new episode, he surely provokes questions from his new audience, whoever they may be.
